The House Of Cain Page 3

  “We must have fallen in love even while we looked in consternation over the figure of Hill sprawled on the pavement. I remember so well the sudden light that came into her eyes. My own, I know, were blazing.

  “From chance acquaintances we became friends. We found we knew the same people, and––afterwards, Monty––were introduced as formally and as properly as even the dear little mother could have wished. I asked her to marry me six months ago.” And then, when he handed the big man a photograph taken from his wallet, he said with simple dignity: “I am a very happy man, Monty.”

  Monty took the photograph and studied it intently. He saw a picture that made him suck in his breath, a picture of a face whereon was indicated beauty of mind as well as beauty of feature. The eyes gazed at him with fearless trust, the lips though inviting were parted like the petals of a rosebud, and the broad forehead proclaimed an intellect above the ordinary.

  “Here,” mused Monty, “are Beauty and Brains combined. Knowing Martin, I expected nothing less.” Aloud he said quietly, making reference to the soldiers’ favourite game of two-up, “It seems to me, old scribbler, that you’re heading ’em pretty well. I know her name is Austiline Thorpe; but who is she?”

  Martin smiled.

  “That I knew you would ask,” he said. “Her people, I understand, live in a Hampshire village where her father is rector. She writes books, and came to Australia in the first instance for local colour.”

  “Writes books, eh? Don’t think I have ever seen her name on a book-cover.” “You wouldn’t Monty. She writes under the name of ‘A. E. Titchfield’.”

  “What!” the big man exclaimed. “The books about wilful maids and he-men who bounce ’em about empty shacks in the Canadian wilds! ‘A. E. Titchfield’ your girl! Well, I never!”

  “It’s extraordinary, I know,” Martin admitted. “That is why I cannot understand why she loves me when there is a man in the world like you.”

  “I can!” asserted Monty. “Any woman who knows anything about he-men with hair on ’em knows enough to miss ’em by a mile.”

  “That was her explanation of the problem when I put it to her. You must for ever keep her pen-name a secret, Monty, for this reason. The first book she wrote, called The Heart of John Strong, was an enormous success. Austiline admits that she was flattered. She wrote two more with even greater success. She created a new type of story. But when she grew a little older she lost her girlish admiration of he-men, and wrote a book––I have read it in MS.––a really wonderful book, but entirely different from the he-man type. The publishers would not risk the financial loss they estimated would occur if it appeared under her own name, and prophesied the utter ruin of ‘A. E. Titchfield’ if that name appeared on its cover. Austiline seems to think she is doomed for ever to go on writing of– –to use your own words––‘wilful maids and he-men with hair on ’em.’ She says she would die of shame if the public got to know she was ‘A. E. Titchfield’.”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Monty remarked emphatically. “There is a something about her books which makes you read ’em right through, and then send for more.” He returned the photograph, adding : “Your Austiline is a lily in a paddock full of daisies. She is the kind of woman who would lend elegance to fur, and not become elegant by wearing fur. I’m mighty glad I brought those skins.”

  He jumped to his feet with surprising agility in so large a man, and, pouncing on the big brown-paper parcel, broke the cord as easily as a woman breaks cotton, and, ripping open the paper, literally kicked out over the carpet a mass of dark silver fox-skins.

  “You see five dozen of the finest fox-skins ever brought out of the back country right here under your nose,” he cried with excusable enthusiasm. “They are the pick of nine hundred pelts Wall-eyed Jack and I caught this winter. Not knowing what’s in fashion now, I thought it a good idea to allow your future wife to decide how she’ll have ’em made up. The finished articles are to be my wedding present to her. She’ll want furs if you are leaving directly for England.”

  Martin said nothing just then. He could not speak. He knew the value of fox-skins and was no mean judge of them. He knew that his brother could not have selected a finer five dozen out of fifty thousand pelts, for each was a perfect match to the rest in colour, texture, and length of fur. Such a parcel as it stood was worth a hundred guineas; when made up by expert furriers the skins would represent at least four times that amount.

  It was a royal gift. When Martin rose to his feet his eyes were shining, and, holding out his hand, he said with unwonted slowness:

  “You always were a damned good sort, Monty!”

  CHAPTER III

  THE SHADOW

  LATER in the afternoon the brothers Sherwood walked up the wide granite steps leading to the vestibule of the Flinders Hotel, the one wrapt in a lover’s reverie, the other revelling in the sensation, so remote from his everyday life, of the jostling crowds along the sidewalks and the ever-flowing river of traffic in the streets.

  The Flinders Hotel is probably the most luxurious and, therefore, most expensive caravanserai in Australia. Nevertheless, because of or perhaps in spite of these characteristics, its guests are exceedingly cosmopolitan: wealthy squatters, famous writers and travellers, island planters and members of the army of wanderers over the continent who, when they do make holiday in the cities, live at the millionaire rate as announced by Monty Sherwood to the desk-girl at his own hotel, are always to be found there.

  Yet of all visitors there the most important appeared to be Miss Austiline Thorpe. When Martin Sherwood called during the daytime, and that was often, the manager himself regularly received him with beaming politeness, immediately deputing a page to escort him to Miss Thorpe’s suite. The dapper little man with the eyes of a bird was issuing from his private office when the two men entered.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Sherwood!” he called out briskly. Then, coming forward: “What a wretchedly dusty day it is, to be sure. Good afternoon, sir!” This to Monty.

  Each made acknowledgment with a nod and a smile. Martin said:

  “It’s the sort of weather we could well do without, Masters. This is my brother, Monty, come out of the Back of Beyond to be my best man on Wednesday.”

  “Ah! Delighted to meet you, Mr. Sherwood. I was informed that you were coming down for the affair. Your brother is a lucky man, sir, extremely lucky. I only wish I were a young man; but please don’t give me away to my wife. You know what wives are, or perhaps you have yet to acquire experience of their little peculiarities?”

  “I am confiding to you all the arrangements for the reception and breakfast, Masters,” interjected Martin, with bright eyes.

  “Imagine yourself Aladdin and me the genie, sir,” replied the little man, half-French, half-Australian. “You have commanded, and I have obeyed to the very last letter. Henri, my brother, and the most wonderful chef in the wide world, I was obliged to take into my confidence. Not another soul besides my wife knows of the coming event. I know, it is in my blood that my brother will out-Henri Henri. How many guests are you inviting?”

  “One gentleman and two ladies, with the addition of Mrs. Masters and yourself.”

  “Sir, you are magnificent,” cried the manager, piloting them along the corridor leading to Austiline’s suite. Monty grinned, but was unobserved. The far more Frenchman than Australian rattled on: “Be assured. Do not worry. Everything has been planned. Henri has a headache through smoking too many cigarettes. For three nights he smoked them, one after the other, but he has been victorious, and has created a new sauce to go with the fish. A sauce of superlative delectability. I tasted it. It was superb. Yes––”

  They had halted outside the door leading to the Blue Suite occupied by Austiline. A faint yet distinct report reaching their ears stopped Masters’ flow of words.

  The three men looked at one another, first in bewilderment, then in alarm.

  “Sounded like a gun,” drawled the big man.

/>   “Yes. And from inside the suite,” Masters agreed, applying his finger to the bell-button. “God! Will no one come?”

  “It’ll be all right, Martin,” Monty assured his brother, who was trembling visibly, his eyes wide with horror, his face like paper.

  “We must let ourselves in,” Masters announced firmly. “It is against the rules of the establishment, but I fear something has happened.”

  With a skeleton-key he opened the door, revealing a small neat hall, which in turn gave entry to three rooms. The doors of these rooms were shut, but it was the centre one that Masters tried to open, knowing that it was the drawing-room. It was locked. When he tried to insert the skeleton-key it was found that the door-key was on the inside.

  “Better burst open the door. Let me lean against it,” Monty suggested.

  “Wait! Listen!” Masters urged.

  Quite plainly they heard some one breathing: a whistling, catching breathing. A sharp knock brought no response or cessation of the breathing.

  “Dear me! I don’t know what to make of it,” the little manager exclaimed.

  “Nor I––with the door shut. Stand away!” came Monty’s voice, strangely metallic.

  Against the pressure of his massive shoulder, an effort which under normal conditions would have aroused admiration, the door splintered loudly and flew inward, the lock being torn out. Upon the threshold they stood as still as those confronted by Medusa’s head. For there, on the floor in the centre of the room, was the stark figure of a man lying on his back, one leg drawn up, one arm grotesquely bent under his body. Blood welled slowly from a small wound exactly in the middle of his forehead. And, looking down at him, was the tenant of the suite dressed in walking costume. She was swaying to and fro on her feet, and her right hand clutched what Monty recognized to be a .22 calibre five-chambered revolver.

  The room, decorated in light blue, was sumptuously furnished. A man’s hat and gloves lay on the mahogany table, over which was spilled a vase of flowers. The large French windows were wide open; the curtains billowing out over the deep veranda.

  “Great heavens, Austiline!” burst out Martin, springing to her side and slipping one arm round her waist. When she made no reply, not even raising her gaze from the prostrate figure, he added softly, coaxingly: “Austiline dear! Tell me! What has happened? Who is this man? What has he done?”

  She seemed neither to see nor fear him, her wide, horror-filled eyes centred upon the still white face and the slow trickle of blood. That the man was dead was too sure. No human being could survive such a wound. While Monty knelt beside the body the little manager slipped out into the hall and barred the front door. On his return the big man nodded approval.

  “Austiline, don’t you know me?” Martin implored.

  “Please let me take that weapon. Come, dear! Come, dear, sit down in this chair.”

  Very slowly she raised her glorious eyes, now stark with horror and set in ivory. A momentary flash of interest came into them when she saw Monty, but instantly her gaze sank again to meet the rising hand holding the revolver.

  The eyelids flickered. The expression of horror gave place to one of bewilderment. Came then a deep-drawn sigh, a slight shudder, a stiffening of her body.

  “Is he dead?” she whispered. Then she added, apparently seeing her promised husband for the first time: “Martin! thank goodness you are here. This is terrible.”

  “Tell me, dear! How did it happen?” he urged distractedly, waiting in torture for her answer; the others no less agitated.

  “He––he came here to demand money––hush money,” she cried in sudden hysteria. “I knew he was coming. I had been to the bank to draw treasury notes, and he was here when I got back, standing beside the table. I tossed the money on the table and commanded him to go. I was expecting you, and didn’t want him here when you came.

  “He was just about to pick up the notes when someone behind me fired. I turned and saw a man locking the door. He rushed forward and seized the bundle of notes. Then he said: ‘You’re well rid of him, Miss,’ and, holding out the revolver to me, I took it. He went out of the window. I don’t remember your coming, Martin. Martin––Martin dear––I feel so sick. Get me some water, please.”

  “I will, but first sit down, Austiline”; and, after practically forcing her into a Chesterfield, he turned-to find Monty at his side with a tumbler of water faintly discoloured with brandy.

  Austiline Thorpe drank deeply, and then sank back as though strength had deserted her. Martin, on his knees before her, held her hands in his, his face the colour of hers; his eyes, big and blazing with terrific mental excitement, searching each one of her features.

  By common impulse Monty and the little man turned and wandered over to the open French windows. Masters caught and drew in the billowing curtains, an act giving uninterrupted view of the wide veranda guarded by a railing of wrought-iron. The veranda or balcony was level with a narrow strip of carefully-tended lawn, beyond which, six or seven feet lower, was the pavement. Masters was about to step out when Monty gripped his arm, whispering:

  “Jumping nannygoats! Look at the tracks.”

  Masters, an indoor man, first looked across the wide thoroughfare, and then intended leaving the apartment to glance along the veranda both ways, as though he might see the murderer escaping into one of the many rooms fronting it. But the giant was a bushman. His first act was to observe the ground, in this case the veranda floor, for tell-tale tracks.

  It was covered with fine red dust. The close-set iron railing protected the carpet of dust to a great extent from the high wind which was blowing from the hotel across the street. It was not a multitude of tracks on the dust which had made him softly exclaim, but lack of them. There was only one set of tracks, and they had been made by a cat. The tracks were almost smothered, and to Monty’s trained eye it was quite evident that they were at least an hour old. The absence of human tracks affected the two men like a blow.

  “It’s a dark world, Masters,” murmured the big man. “I cannot believe it. Miss Thorpe must––mon Dieu! This is terrible.”

  “We’ve got to believe it,” came Monty’s hardened voice. “If there was a man in the room who fired the shot, where is he? He didn’t leave by the window, else he would have left tracks there on the veranda. And it is unlikely that he jumped across to the railings, because the distance must be at least ten feet. He may have just managed––it is a remote possibility––to escape from this room and hide in one of the others, and then left by the front door while we’ve been in here. Go and see if the front door has been unbarred.”

  Left alone, Monty Sherwood allowed his thoughts to race. He was coldly, deadly calm. The situation required clear thought and decided action; life or death might hang on his doing the right thing quickly.

  It was natural and human for him first to consider how the corpse could be hidden from the eagle vision of the law; and that idea was discarded not because such an act would be legally wrong, but rather because criminal history has proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the chances of successfully concealing a body are about one in a thousand.

  The second idea, equally natural and human, was to invent a chain of lies to satisfy the law that the corpse within had materialized through a justifiable act on Austiline’s part.

  Half a dozen such chains occurred to him. But, casting one swift glance at the still tableau behind him, one penetrating look at Austiline’s lovely face, his shrewd character-judgment obliged him to condemn this second idea also. Austiline was a woman doubtless capable of tempestuous passion; capable also, possible, of sudden violent action under terrible provocation; yet incapable of lying superbly.

  Then how account for her statement that the man was shot by a second man who escaped by the window? How account, if that were true, for the absence of human tracks? Her overwrought mind probably created the second man, a creation so vivid that the situation had stamped it upon her brain as truth. But suppose that there had really
been a second man; suppose that she had spoken the unvarnished truth: how had the man escaped from the room?

  Now, Monty’s respect for the law was profound. Voracious novel-reader though he was, his experience of police action in Central and Northern Australia had taught him that the average detective is by no means the fool many novelists imagine him to be. Having reached the decision that Austiline might have spoken the truth, he felt confident that men far more expert at such problems than himself would discover how the murderer left the room.

  But a man’s reasoning follows the line of his own mental composition. It never occurred to him that anyone having scrutinized Austiline’s face and heard her story would doubt the truth both of her words and of her facial expression. It did not occur to him that, being the brother of her fiancé, he was naturally biased in her favour; and that others would examine the situation with the coolness of a vivisectionist testing a new variety of death on a rabbit.

  When Masters rejoined him, his jaws were clenched grimly and his eyes were sombre.

  “The door is still barred,” reported the little man softly. “I have searched the other two rooms thoroughly, and have discovered no intruder. They are lighted by windows like this one, and open out on the same veranda. There are no footprints on the dust in front of them. Only those of the cat.”

  The big man sighed and pursed his lips.

  “It beats me,” he said simply.

  “You think as I do––that she shot him?”

  “I don’t know. Yet I doubt that she did.”

  Masters looked up sharply.

  “Then you have a theory?”

  “Wish I had.”

  “But, my dear sir,” Masters expostulated, “Miss Thorpe’s story won’t hold water. Did she not say that the man escaped through this window, and did not you yourself state that no man passed out as there are no human footprints on that dust?”

  “No matter,” came the stubborn answer.