Crime In Leper's Hollow Read online

  “She’s dancin’ again...”

  Elspeth said it as if to herself. Her voice was flat and tired.

  The young man shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t care what his mother did. He wasn’t interested in her behaviour which, like his own, had always been queer and without consideration for anybody else. She had never restrained herself; not even before her children. In Alec’s younger days, she had even taken him, as an alibi, to various rendezvous with her lovers. He had been sent to play, foisted on servants, left at the cinema, even lodged, like a parcel of left-luggage, with her friends whilst she had kept her assignations. He had grown impervious to anything his mother did. Now he regarded her and her treatment of him in the past as excuses for his own strange conduct and misdemeanours. She had always taken his part when his father remonstrated. She would always defend him before the world...

  Nita, closely bound to Nicholas almost from birth, had adored him. In unspoken ways, she had sensed his sorrow, his patient suffering, his infinite and tragic kindness. He had married, impulsively, a woman who had brought him nothing but unhappiness. The honour of his family and profession soon came to mean nothing to Dulcie Crake. Tired of her husband’s solid, faithful nature, she had sought shameful adventure all over the countryside. Only the respect and affection in which the Crake family were held, and in which Nicholas and his daughter shared, made his position tenable.

  Nita wondered if her father had wanted to get well in his last illness...Now, she thought, she would say good-bye for ever to Beyle and let it fall to further ruin without a thought...

  “She’s dancin’ again...”

  The girl felt the hot blood rise in her throat till she almost suffocated. This dancing was some kind of ritual, some secret between Dulcie and her crazy brother, just as humour and laughter had for so long been a secret between her and her father. Sometimes the strange pair would not indulge in their capers for months on end. Then, like an epidemic of mania, it would seize them and they would lock themselves in Uncle Bernard’s room and he would play on his piano, exquisite, wild music, tarantellas and mazurkas, for hours on end, until, exhausted, Dulcie would collapse into a deep sleep and lie on the couch like one in a trance.

  In her childhood, these fantastic orgies had terrified Nita. There was something nightmarish, diabolical, obscene about them. She remembered how, curious and fascinated, she had peeped through the keyhole and seen her mother, hair dishevelled, feet bare, whirling round and round, scantily dressed, clutching an invisible partner in an orgasm of sensual pleasure, with Uncle Bernard playing softly and beautifully, his wild, dark eyes fixed on his sister as she moved...

  Now, even in the presence of death, Dulcie Crake was dancing! It was like resorting to drugs or alcohol in a crisis. It was indecent...an affront to the dead! Nita rose and with quick steps ran upstairs to her uncle’s quarters.

  The last rays of a wintry sunset shone through the stained-glass window on the turn of the stairs and reflected the coloured uneven pattern of rubies, yellows and blues, on the opposite wall. The rain had ceased and mist floated in the Beyle valley, rising from the stream and its overgrown banks in an unearthly vapour which, from the road, made the towers and steep-pitched roofs of the house seem to float on clouds like the castle of a wizard. Her uncle’s room was at the end of the corridor, a large and sombre place in which he slept and took his meals. It was cluttered with masses of old books, the walls were covered with them from floor to ceiling: music, medicine, alchemy, black arts, strange religions, outlandish practices. In one corner, a large, four-poster bed stood, gaunt, without hangings; in the bay window, the splendid grand piano which, according to his moods, he hammered in wild abandon or gently caressed with exquisite grace. Sometimes he continued far into the night; he even got up in the small hours and played to himself if the whim broke his sleep. His small dressing-room and the bathroom they had fitted for him years ago, when he came for a holiday and stayed for good, were littered with the apparatus of his scientific experiments, test tubes, retorts, furnaces, ovens, glass fashioned in fantastic shapes, bottles, essences, powders and liquors. Sometimes he caught rats and mice in the old outbuildings for his strange researches in alchemy and surgery. Now and then he made trips into the woods and fields around to gather plants, barks and fungi, and even stones, for his work. During such absences, Nita had often explored his rooms. The linen-room key, unknown to Uncle Bernard, fitted the lock. Finally, finding two caged rats with their tails cut off to bloody stumps and madly trying to escape, she had fled, shrieking from the place, forgotten to lock the door behind her and lived for days in fear and trembling lest the alchemist should discover her intrusion by his magic arts. Uncle Bernard never announced the results of his researches; he seemed to relish keeping his secrets locked in his breast.

  And now he was playing a Spanish dance again and, without peeping through the keyhole, Nita knew what her mother was doing. With her father still dead in the house! She beat on the strong, locked door with both fists. Hysteria rose in her throat like a globe of ice.

  “Stop it! Stop it! It’s disgraceful...”

  The music continued as though nothing had happened. She flung herself on the panels again, but still without avail. Panting from her exertions and sobbing with anger, she ran to the end of the landing, thrust her hand round the door of the linen-room and took the key. Back again, she inserted it in the lock of her uncle’s room. At first, the key on the other side resisted her efforts, but by juggling and forcing she thrust it out and heard it drop on the floor. The occupants inside must have heard it, too, for the music stopped. Before they could act, Nita had opened the door.

  Her uncle was just rising from the piano. She had never seen him look so diabolical. He was tall and emaciated at the best of times. His thin face and sunken cheeks bore several days’ growth of beard. His high nose, like the beak of a bird of prey, and his dark brown-shot eyes gave him a perfect Mephistophelian cast. His hair was still jet black for, out of some strange pride, he anointed it with a colour-preserving pomade of his own make. His eyebrows and long, slender drooping moustache, were quite white, however. He always dressed in black with a waisted out-of-date frock-coat, like a Continental virtuoso of the early nineteenth century. His tall, starched collar kept his neck stiff and erect and, as he looked angrily at the intruder, seemed almost to be pushing his head backwards. He pointed a long slender forefinger at Nita, as though casting a spell upon her. In his dishevelled state, he looked like Don Quixote himself after a battle with fantastic assailants.

  “Get out! Get out! For the love of God, get out!”

  Nita was not looking. Her eyes were fixed on her mother, who had sunk exhausted on the long couch behind the piano. She was either at the end of an epileptic seizure or had fallen into a peaceful sleep. Her cheeks were delicately flushed, her face serene, and she moved her limbs voluptuously now and then as though enjoying the luxury of a feather bed instead of an old sofa. Her feet were bare and her dark, silky hair hung loose about her face.

  Before she could stir a step further, her Uncle Bernard had Nita by the shoulders and propelled her swiftly to the door, flung her in the passage, locked her out, and hurried back to his sister. Nita felt to have no strength left. Vainly she sought in her mind one solitary person on whom she could rely implicitly in her trouble. Her brother would laugh at her. Her aunt hated her mother so much that emotion always impaired her judgment when she had Dulcie to deal with. There was a young doctor at the hospital who loved her; he had told her so many times and he asked her to marry him nearly three times a day. But she didn’t feel that way about him and it didn’t seem fair...Utter silence in her uncle’s room! Such a silence that it seemed to grow upon her like a great weight. Her knees gave way and she sank on the carpet. Feet shuffled upstairs, and there was Elspeth. A weak old thing, but a comfort at such a time. Nita took the tired outstretched hands and clung to them.

  “There’ll be more deaths in this house before the next moon,” intoned the
old woman in the dull voice she used when seized by her”do’s” of second-sight.

  In Uncle Bernard’s room, the piano started again. It was not a dance this time, but the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto, which Uncle Bernard had forgotten years ago on the concert platform and ruined his musical career. As he reached the bars which had once evaded him, Bernard played them with confidence. Then he pounded the keyboard in harsh discord and burst into yells of demoniacal laughter.

  Three – The Bride Wore Black

  ON the day of the funeral, Dulcie and her brother rose early and conducted themselves sedately, as though they were the sanest people in the world. She was clad in full black, a dress of exquisite design, executed by a first-class maker. She was going to take full advantage of the limelight on that day, like a bride on her wedding. Even the hat which supported the heavy black veil was a model.

  Uncle Bernard wore black from head to foot. He had in his room large chests of clothes, past relics of his family, out-of-date ceremonial raiment of days gone by in many kinds of foreign styles. The usual stovepipe collar was held together by a large black bow; he wore a three-quarter frock-coat, black trousers and black elastic-sided shoes. In his hand he carried an ancient top-hat and, as the day was chilly, was wearing, although it was warm in the room and there were still two hours to go, a heavy top-coat with a collar of astrakhan. He kept pulling his watch from his fob-pocket and looking at it. Two great seals clanked and clicked as he did so. He looked annoyed at the slow passing of time. He was going to give his sister his arm at the funeral. She had refused to have Alec do it because he declined to wear mourning. Instead, he was waiting impatiently, dressed in a grey suit and red tie. The three of them were like actors standing in the wings ready for their turn in the show; whilst Nita and Elspeth were left to make all the arrangements and do all the work. Nita wore a simple black costume. In the past, it had not been the practice of the Crake women to attend funerals. Dulcie, however, was not going to miss this chance of playing a part, so Nita had decided to go as well to see that things went decently.

  The body had gone to the undertaker’s parlour. There the cortège was to assemble and enter into procession to the church. The vicar, the Rev. Joshua Roebuck, was already with the widow, making sure that nothing in the arrangements had been missed. Nita had strongly objected to his having anything to do with the funeral. Her father had never liked him and she knew he would have preferred the court chaplain, a sterling young parson who would have conducted the affair in a seemly fashion and without fuss. But Roebuck belonged to Dulcie’s clique. He had called and engaged himself for the occasion as soon as the death was known.

  “Leave it all to me, dear lady,” he was saying to Dulcie.

  They had invited him to breakfast, so early had he arrived, and, although he had finished a large meal before he left the vicarage, he had drawn up to the table and started again. He was busy at the sideboard filling up his plate for a second time.

  “Leave it all to me...In your grief, dear lady, you must not be harassed. I will take full charge...” He balanced a kidney on his fork, turned his fat beaming face to the widow and bowed slightly, like a counter-jumper assuring a customer of absolute satisfaction. He looked quite in keeping, a bird of the same feather as Dulcie and Bernard. A small, spindle-shanked man, with an enormous gluttonous barrel of a belly, which he made no effort to hide. His red-moon face was always perspiring as though toasted before a fire, his button-nose was livid from wine and digestive corruption, and his fleshy mouth was moist and ever-moving, in full function ready to gobble anything that came within reach. He shovelled his bacon and kidneys eagerly between his thick lips with hasty gestures, like a dog who fears its dish will be removed by malicious hands.

  “I didn’t want the band, but they insist. Besides, Sir Ronald is vice-president and we must satisfy his whims. He wishes it...” Mr. Roebuck spoke with his mouth full and paused to wash down his food with a copious draught of coffee. He then mopped his lips and started again.

  “The band!”

  Uncle Bernard halted in the act of drawing on his black kid gloves for the tenth time.

  “I cannot bear it. Every discord is agony to me...”

  The town boasted a prize band and Nicholas Crake had been its president. In his young days, he had played the trombone himself and until his death had done all he could to encourage local talent. In this he was assisted by his friend and vice-president, Sir Ronald Goosenargh, and, patronized by these two potentates, the band had been of festival strength. However much the local pundits had hated bands and their music, they had, with two such influential men in the lead, pretended to give their support. Thus, the Tilsey Town Brass Band had a large following. They were going to church to play their dead president to his last rest.

  “I’m afraid we have no choice...”

  Mr. Roebuck squirmed and leered. Sir Ronald helped to make up the stipend of the church, and his wish was law. To tell the truth, Goosenargh had a sense of humour. When he heard of the pomp and circumstance which was going to see the judge to his grave, he insisted on the band. He smiled to himself as he did so, because Nick would have enjoyed it, too. That was why Nick had included the request in his will!

  “Then I shall stuff my ears with cotton-wool whilst they play,” said Uncle Bernard. He put on his hat for the third time and pulled out his watch again.

  “Isn’t it time, yet...?”

  The church filled quickly and long before the funeral service. The local gentry, the M.P., the Mayor and Corporation, the bench and the bar, the police and the fire brigade were present in their numbers. Special portions of the church had been allotted to each faculty by that master of ceremonies, the Rev. Joshua Roebuck. The choir were there, as well, with Tom Trumper, principal bass for untold years, glowing in their midst, yet with his usual beefy smile missing. Something was worrying Tom. He had done a lot of whispering about it, too, over the days since the judge’s death. Already the thin wind of his gossip was developing into a gale of disapproval levelled against the widow of Nicholas Crake, who had not yet arrived with the body.

  The church bell tolled dismally and the Mayor, who had developed a cough and cold, snuffled miserably and sucked his cough lozenges. His chain of office, worn for the occasion, felt to weigh a ton. Mr. Huxtable, for that was his name, dolefully wondered how long it would be before they gathered to speed him on his last journey. Certainly, the way he felt at present, it wouldn’t be long. The Town Clerk, sitting beside him, a long, thin, chilly lawyer named Legge, had been up late the previous night playing bridge and was only with difficulty keeping awake. He nodded off now and then, only to be wakened by the Mayor’s hacking cough ringing in his ears. It’s an ill wind...Nobody spoke. They all looked petrified, their faces masks of what they assumed to be reverence and regret. The building was cold, for they were short of coke and the corporation Fuel Officer, seated in the nave, received black looks for withholding supplies. There were approximately four hundred people in the congregation and they seemed to draw together like animals, to heat one another against the cold. At the back of the privileged sitters stood the humbler fry, about a hundred of them, huddled together. These were composed of those who had really loved and respected Nicholas Crake, publicans, sinners, lesser public officials and workmen, widows whom he had helped, gaolbirds he had treated with mercy, outcasts he had befriended...

  A child in arms started with the unmistakable paroxysms of whooping-cough and from the mass of heads in the body of the church rose the faces of three doctors, angry and questioning, like hounds awakened by the hunting-horn...

  The coffin entered, borne on the shoulders of four bandsmen. It all seemed wrong somehow, but it had been in the Will of Nicholas Crake that these friends of his should carry his coffin and be pall-bearers. Fourteen of them in the town-band uniform in procession and then the widow on the arm of her brother. She looked like a bride in black and some form of macabre wedding march ought to have greeted her
arrival in church. Her heavy veil was lowered and her head was bowed. Her brother didn’t seem to know what to do with his hat. The two children followed, like strangers who had just drifted in on the off-chance and found themselves in the funeral procession by mistake. Nita had on her black costume; Alec wore what looked like holiday clothes. They seemed forlorn; afterthoughts, supers, invited to the ceremony at short notice. The bandsmen, met at the door by Mr. Roebuck with a surplice hanging from his huge paunch like a tent, deposited the coffin. Someone had forgotten to erect the catafalque and two of the undertaker’s men ran out with two trestles and a board, manoeuvred them with fumbling hands, and arranged the coffin on them. Then the scene-shifters of this strange drama withdrew and left the stage to Mr. Roebuck. He intoned in a twanging nasal voice, the congregation rose, and the band played one of Nicholas Crake’s favourite brass-band hymns.

  There had been some debate at the meeting of the band which chose the musical accompaniment of their president’s funeral.”Let’s give ’im A Day’s March Nearer Home, he always liked it,” said one faction, but they were outvoted by the supporters of Glory For Me.

  When all our labours and trials are o’er,

  And we are safe on that beautiful shore...

  At the first blast of brass, everybody jumped as though the roof were caving in. It was like a tornado, the equal of which had never been heard in St. Sepulchre’s before. It shook the ancient timbers and brought down dust from the beams overhead. Uncle Bernard corked up his ears with the promised cotton-wool, like somebody getting ready for a journey by ‘plane. Sir Ronald Goosenargh smiled to himself. He thought of his old friend’s last joke with delight. And lie almost laughed outright at the sight of this large, very respectable, orthodox congregation singing the romping revivalist hymn. The band, having played the air, waited and then led the singing louder than before. Not only that, the drummers, warned beforehand by the conductor to”’old themselves in”, were carried away by emotion, and gave it all they’d got. It sounded like a piece in the class of 1812, describing an artillery battle. One by one the assembly joined in, self-consciously, outraged, watching one another from the corners of their eyes.