The Hollow Man Part 11

'First of all, before we forget it, about what you were saying when you came in here- '

'You overheard it, eh?'

'Yes. It's unfortunate,' said Hadley composedly, 'that we couldn't have overheard more. Miss Grimaud said that you were in this flat last night. Were you?'

'I was not.'

'You were not... Was he, Miss Grimaud?'

Her colour had come back; come back strongly, for she was angry with a quiet, smiling poise. She spoke in a breathless way, and her long hazel eyes had that fixity, that luminous, strained expression of one who determines to show no emotion. She was pressing her gloves between the fingers, and in the jerkiness of her breathing there was less anger than fear.

'Since you overheard it,' she answered, after a speculative pause while she glanced from one to the other, 'it's no good my denying it, is there? I don't see why you're interested. It can't have anything to do with - my father's death. That's certain. Whatever else Jerome is,' she showed her teeth in an unsteady smile, 'he's not a murderer. But since for some reason you are interested, I've a good mind to have the whole thing thrashed out now. Some version of this, I can see, is going to get back to Boyd. It might as well be the true one ... I'll begin by saying, yes, Jerome was in this flat last night.'

'How do you know that, Miss Grimaud? Were you here?'

'No. But I saw a light in this room at half - past ten.'

BURNABY, still rubbing his chin, looked down at her in dull blankness. Rampole could have sworn that the roan was genuinely startled; so startled that he could not quite understand her words, and peered at her as though he had never seen her before. Then he spoke in a quiet, common - sense tone which contrasted with his earlier one.

'I say, Rosette,' he observed, 'be careful now. Are you sure you know what you're talking about?'

'Yes. Quite sure.'

Hadley cut in briskly. 'At half - past ten? How did you happen to see this light, Miss Grimaud, when you were at your own home with us?'

'Oh, no, I wasn't - if you remember. Not at that time. I was at the nursing - home, with the doctor in the room where my father was dying. I don't know whether you know it, but the back of the nursing - home faces the back of this house. I happened to be near a window, and I noticed. There was a light in this room; and, I think, the bathroom too, though I'm not positive of that -'

'How do you know the rooms,' said Hadley sharply, 'if you've never been here before?'

'I took jolly good care to observe when we came in just now,' she answered, with a serene and imperturbable smile which somehow reminded Rampole of Mills. 'I didn't know the rooms last night; I only knew he had this flat, and where the windows were. The curtains weren't quite drawn. That's how I came to notice the light.'

Burnaby was still contemplating her with the same heavy curiosity.

'Just a moment, Mr - Inspector - er -!' He humped his shoulder. 'Are you sure you couldn't have been mistaken about the rooms, Rosette?'

'Positive, my dear. This is the house on the left - hand side at the corner of the alley, and you have the top floor.'

'And you say you saw me?'

'No, I say I saw a light. But you and I are the only ones who know about this flat. And, since you'd invited me here, and said you would be here -'

'By G.o.d!' said Burnaby, 'I'm curious to see how far you'll go.' He hobbled over, with a trick of pulling down the corner of his mouth each time he lunged on the cane; he sat down heavily in a chair, and continued to study her out of his pale eyes. That upstanding hair gave him somehow a queerly alert look. 'Please go on! You interest me. Yes. I'm curious to see how far you have the nerve to go.'

'Are you really?' said Rosette, in a flat voice. She whirled round; but her resolution seemed to crack and she succeeded in looking only miserable to the point of tears. 'I wish I knew myself! I - I wish I knew about you! ... I said we'd have this out,' she appealed to Hadley, 'but now I don't know whether I want to have it out. If I could decide about him, whether he's really sympathetic, and just a nice bluff old - old -'

'Don't say friend of the family,' snapped Burnaby. 'For Lord's sake don't say friend of the family. Personally, I wish I could decide about you. I wish I could decide whether you think you're telling the truth, or whether you're (excuse me for forgetting my chivalry for a moment!) a lying little vixen.'

She went on steadily: '- or whether he's a sort of polite blackmailer. Oh, not for money!' She blazed again. 'Vixen? Yes. b.i.t.c.h if you like. I admit it. I've been both - but why? Because you've poisoned everything with all the hints you've dropped - if I could be sure they were hints and not just my imagination; if I could even be sure you were an honest blackmailer! ...'

Hadley intervened. 'Hints about what?'

'Oh, about my father's past life, if you must know.' She clenched her hands. 'About my birth, for one thing, and whether we mightn't add another nice term to b.i.t.c.h. But that's not important. That doesn't bother me at all. It's this business about some horrible thing - about my father - I don't know! Maybe they're not even hints. But - I've got it in my head somehow that old Drayman is a blackmailer ... Then, last night, Jerome asked me to come over here - why, why? I thought: well, is it because that's the night Boyd always sees me, and it will tickle Jerome's vanity no end to choose just that night? But I don't and I didn't - please understand me! - want to think Jerome was trying a little blackmail himself. I do like him; I can't help it; and that's what makes it so awful...'

'We might clear it up, then,' said Hadley. 'Were you "hinting", Mr Burnaby?'

There was a long silence while Burnaby examined his hands. Something in the posture of his bent head, in his slow, heavy breathing, as though he were bewilderedly trying to make up his mind, kept Hadley from prompting him until he raised his head.

'I never thought -' he said. 'Hinting. Yes. Yes, in strict accuracy, I suppose I was. But never intentionally. I'll swear I never thought -' He stared at Rosette. 'Those tilings slip out. Maybe you mean only what you think is a subtle question ...' He puffed out his breath in a sort of despairing hiss, and shrugged his shoulders. 'To me it was an interesting, deductive game, that's all. I didn't even think of it as prying. I swear I never thought anybody noticed, let alone taking it to heart. Rosette, if that's the only reason for your interest in me - thinking I was a blackmailer, and afraid of me - then I'm sorry I learned. Or am I?' He looked down at his hands again, opened and shut them, and then looked slowly round the room. 'Take a look at this place, gentlemen. The front room especially - but you'll have seen that. Then you know the answer. The Great Detective. The poor a.s.s with the deformed foot, dreaming.'

For a second Hadley hesitated.

'And did the Great Detective find out anything about Dr Grimaud's past?'

'No ... If I had, do you think I'd be apt to tell you?'

'We'll see if we can't persuade you. Do you know that there are blood - stains in that bathroom of yours, where Miss Grimaud says she saw a light last night? Do you know that Pierre Fley was murdered outside your door not long before half - past ten?'

Rosette Grimaud cried out, and Burnaby jerked up his head.

'Fley mur - Blood - stains! No! Where? Man, what do you mean?'

'Fley had a room in this street. We think he was coming here when he died. Anyhow, he was shot in the street outside here by the same man who killed Dr Grimaud. Can you prove who you are, Mr Burnaby? Can you prove, for instance, that you are not actually, Dr Grimaud's and Fley's brother?'

The other stared at him. He hoisted himself up shakily from the chair.

'Good G.o.d! man, are you mad?' he asked in a quiet voice. 'Brother! Now I see! ... No, I'm not his brother. Do you think if I were his brother I should be interested in -' He checked himself, glanced at Rosette, and his expression became rather wild. 'Certainly I can prove it. I ought to have a birth certificate somewhere. I - I can produce people who've known me all my life. Brother!'

Hadley reached round to the divan and held up the coil of rope.

'What about this rope? Is it a part of your Great Detective scheme, too?'

'That thing? No. What is it? I never saw it before. Brother!'

Rampole glanced at Rosette Grimaud, and saw that she was crying. She stood motionless, her hands at her sides and her (ace set; but the tears brimmed over her eyes.

'And can you prove,' Hadley continued, 'that you were not in this flat last night?'

Burnaby drew a deep breath. Relief lightened his heavy face.

'Yes, fortunately I can. I was at my club last night from eight o'clock - or thereabouts; maybe a little earlier - until past eleven. Dozens of people will tell you that. If you want me to be specific, ask the three I played poker with the whole of that time. Do you want an alibi? Right! There's w strong an alibi as you're ever likely to get. I wasn't here. I didn't leave any blood - stains, wherever the devil you say you found some. I didn't kill Fley, or Grimaud, or anybody else.' His heavy jaw came out. 'Now then, what do you think of that?'

The superintendent swung his batteries so quickly that Burnaby had hardly finished speaking before Hadley had turned to Rosette.

'You still insist that you saw a light here at half - past ten."

'Yes!... But, Jerome, truly I never meant -!'

'Even though, when my man arrived here this morning, the electric meter was cut off and the lights would not work?'

'I - Yes, it's still true! But what I wanted to say - '

'Let's suppose Mr Burnaby is telling the truth about last night. You say he invited you here. Is it likely that he invited you here when he intended to be at his club?'

Burnaby lurched forward and put a hand on Hadley's arm. ' Steady! Let's get this straightened out, inspector. That's what I did. It was a swine's trick, but - I did it. Look here, have I got to explain?'

'Now, now, now!' struck in the quiet, rumbling, deprecating tones of Dr Fell. He took out the bandana and blew his nose with a loud, honking noise, to attract attention. Then he blinked at them, mildly disturbed. 'Hadley, we're confused enough as it is. Let me put in a soothing word. Mr Burnaby did that, as he expressed it himself, to make her jump through a hoop. Hurrum! Excuse my bluntness, ma'am, but then it's all right because that particular leopard wouldn't jump, eh? - About the question of the light not working, that's not nearly so ominous as it sounds. It's a s.h.i.+lling meter, d'ye see. Somebody was here. Somebody left the lights burning, possibly all night. Well, the meter used up a bob's worth of electricity, and then the lights went out. We don't know which way the switches were turned, because Somers got here first. Blast it, Hadley, we've got ample proof that there was somebody here last night. The question is, who?' He looked at the others. 'H'm. You two say that n.o.body else knew of this place. But - a.s.suming your story to be straight, Mr Burnaby; and you'd be a first - cla.s.s fathead to lie about a thing so easily checked up as that story - then somebody else must have known of it.'

'I can only tell you I wasn't likely to speak of it,' insisted Burnaby, rubbing his chin. ' Unless somebody noticed me coming here - unless - '

'Unless, in other words, I told somebody about it?' Rosette flared again. Her sharp teeth bit at her under lip. 'But I didn't. I - I don't know why I didn't' - she seemed fiercely puzzled - 'but I never mentioned it to anybody. There!'

'But you have a key to the place?' asked Dr Fell.

'I had a key to the place. I lost it.'

'When?'

'Oh, how should I know? I never noticed.' She had folded her arms and was walking round the room with excited little movements of her head. 'I kept it in my bag, and I only noticed this morning, when we were coming over here, that it was gone. But one thing I insist on knowing.' She stopped, facing Burnaby. 'I - I don't know whether I'm fond of you or whether I hate you. If it was only a nasty little fondness for detective work, if that's all it really was and you didn't mean anything, then speak up. What do you know about my father? Tell me! I don't mind. They're the police and they'll find out anyway. Now, now, don't act! I hate your acting. Tell me. What's this about brothers?'

'That's good advice, Mr Burnaby. You painted a picture,' said Hadley, 'that I was going to ask about next. What did you know about Dr Grimaud?'

Burnaby, leaning back against the window with an unconsciously swaggering gesture, shrugged his shoulders. His pale - grey eyes, with their pin - point black pupils, s.h.i.+fted and gleamed sardonically.

He said: 'Rosette, if I had ever known, if I had ever suspected, that my detective efforts were being interpreted as - Very well! I'll tell you in a few words what I'd have told you long ago, if I had known it worried you at all. Your father was once imprisoned at the salt - mines in Hungary, and he escaped. Not very terrible, is it?'

'In prison! What for?'

'For trying to start a revolution, I was told ... My own guess is for theft. You see, I'm being frank.'

Hadley cut in quickly: 'Where did you learn that? From Drayman?'

'So Drayman knows, does he?' Burnaby stiffened, and his eyes narrowed. 'Yes, I rather thought he did. Ah! Yes. That was another thing I tried to find out, and it seems to have been construed into - And, come to think of it, what do you fellows know about it, anyhow?' Then he burst out: 'Look here, I'm no busybody! I'd better tell you if only to prove it. I was dragged into the thing; Grimaud wouldn't let me alone. You talk about that picture. The picture was the cause rather than the effect. It was all accident - though I had a bad time persuading Grimaud of that. It was all on account of a d.a.m.ned magic - lantern lecture.'

'A what?'

'Fact! A magic - lantern lecture. I ducked into the thing to get out of the rain one night; it was out in North London somewhere, a parish hall, about eighteen months ago.' Wryly Burnaby twiddled his thumbs. For the first time there was an honest and homely expression on his face. 'I'd like to make a romantic story out of this. But you asked for the truth. Right! Chap was lecturing on Hungary: lantern slides and plenty of ghostly atmosphere to thrill the church - goers. But it caught my imagination; by George, it did!' His eyes gleamed. 'There was one slide - something like what I painted. Nothing effective about it; but the story that went with it, about the three lonely graves in an unhallowed place gave me a good idea for a nightmare. The lecturer inferred that they were vampires' graves, you see? I came home and worked like fury on the idea. Well, I frankly told everybody it was an imaginative conception of something I never saw. But for some reason n.o.body believed me. Then Grimaud saw it - '

'Mr Pettis told us,' Hadley remarked, woodenly, 'that it gave him a turn. Or that you said it did.'

'Gave him a turn? I should say it did! He hunched his head down into his shoulders and stood as quiet as a mummy, looking at it. I took it as a tribute. And then, in my sinister innocence,' said Burnaby, with a kind of leer, 'out I came with the remark, "You'll notice how the earth is cracking on one grave. He's just getting out." My mind was still running on vampires, of course. But he didn't know that. For a second I thought he was coming at me with a palette knife.'

It was a straightforward story Burnaby told. Grimaud, he said, had questioned him about that picture; questioned, watched, questioned again, until even a less imaginative man would have been suspicious. The uneasy tension of being always under surveillance had set him to solve the puzzle in ordinary self - defence. A few pieces of handwriting in books in Grimaud's library; the s.h.i.+eld of arms over the mantelpiece; a casual word dropped - Burnaby looked at Rosette with a grim smile. Then, he continued, about three months before the murder Grimaud had collared him, and, under an oath of secrecy, told him the truth. The 'truth' was exactly the story Drayman had told Hadley and Dr Fell last night: the plague, the two dead brothers, the escape.

During this time Rosette had been staring out of the window with an incredulous, half - witted blankness which ended in something like a tearfulness of relief.

'And that's all?' she cried, breathing hard. 'That's all there is to it? That's what I've been worrying about all this time?'

'That's all, my dear,' Burnaby answered, folding his arms. 'I told you it wasn't very terrible. But I didn't want to tell it to the police. Now, however, that you've insisted - '

'Be careful, Hadley,' grunted Dr Fell in a low voice, and knocked against the superintendent's arm. He cleared his throat. ' Harrumph! Yes. We have some reason to believe the story, too, Miss Grimaud.'

Hadley took a new line. 'Supposing all this to be true, Mr Burnaby: you were at the Warwick Tavern the night Fley came in first?'

'Yes.'

'Well, then? Knowing what you did, didn't you connect him with that business in the past? Especially after his remarks about the three coffins?'

Burnaby hesitated, and then gestured. 'Frankly, yes. I walked home with Grimaud on that night - the Wednesday night. I didn't say anything, but I thought he was going to tell me something. We sat down on either side of the fire in his study, and he took an extra large whisky, a thing he seldom does. I noticed he seemed to be looking very hard at the fire - place...'

'By the way,' Dr Fell put in, with such casualness that Rampole jumped, 'where did he keep his private and personal papers? Do you know?'

The other darted a sharp glance at him.

'Mills would be better able to tell you that than I,' he returned. (Something veiled, something guarded, some cloud of dust here?) 'He may have had a safe. So far as I know, he kept them in a locked drawer at the side of that big desk.'

'Go on.'

'For a long time neither of us said anything. There was one of those uncomfortable strains when each person wants to introduce a subject, but wonders whether the other is thinking about it too. Well, I took the plunge, and said, "Who was it?" He made one of those noises of his, like a dog just before it barks, and s.h.i.+fted round in the chair. Finally he said: "I don't know. It's been a long time. It may have been the doctor; it looked like the doctor."'

"Doctor? You mean the one who certified him as dead of plague at the prison?' asked Hadley. Rosette Grimaud s.h.i.+vered, and suddenly sat down with her face in her hands. Burnaby grew uncomfortable.

'Yes. Look here, must I go on with this? ... All right, all right! "Back for a little blackmail," he said. You know the look of the stoutish opera stars, who sing Mephistopheles in Faust? He looked just like that when he turned round towards me, with his hands on the arms of the chair, and his elbows hooked as though he were going to get up. Face reddish with the fire - light, clipped beard, raised eyebrows - everything. I said, "Yes, but actually what can he do?" You see, I was trying to draw him out. I thought it must be more serious than a political offence, or it wouldn't carry any weight after so long. He said, "Oh, he won't do anything. He never had the nerve. He won't do anything."

'Now,' snapped Burnaby, looking round, 'you asked for everything, and here it is. I don't mind. Everybody knows it. Grimaud said, with that barking directness of his, "You want to marry Rosette, don't you?" I admitted it. He said, "Very well; you shall," and began nodding and drumming on the arm of the chair. I laughed and said - Well! I said something about Rosette's having a preference in another direction. He said: "Bah! the young one! I'll fix that."'

Rosette was looking at him with a hard, luminous, inscrutable stare, her eyes nearly closed. She spoke in a tone too puzzling to identify. She said: 'So you had it all arranged, did you?'

'O Lord, don't fly off the handle! You know better than that. I was asked what happened, and here it is. The last thing he said was that, whatever happened to him, I was to keep my mouth shut about what I knew - '

'Which you didn't ...'

'At your express orders, no.' He turned back to the others. 'Well, gentlemen, that's all I can tell you. When he came hurrying in on Friday morning to get that picture, I was a good deal puzzled. But I had been told to keep out of it entirely, and I did.'

Hadley, who had been writing in his note - book, went on without speaking until he came to the end of the page. Then he looked at Rosette, who was sitting back on the divan with a pillow under her elbow. Under the fur coat she wore a dark dress, but her head was bare as usual; so that the heavy blonde hair and square face seemed to fit with the gaudy red and yellow divan. She turned her hand outward from the wrist, shakily.

'I know. You're going to ask me what I think of all this. About my father - and all.' She stared at the ceiling. 'I don't know. It takes such a load off my mind, it's so much too good to be true, that I'm afraid somebody's not telling the truth. Why, I'd have admired the old boy for a thing like that! It's - it's awful and terrible, and I'm glad he had so much of the devil in him. Of course, if he was because he was a thief - she smiled in some pleasure at the idea - 'you can't blame him for keeping it quiet, can you?'

'That was not what I was going to ask,' said Hadley, who seemed a good deal taken aback by this frankly broad - minded att.i.tude. 'I do want to know why, if you always refused to come over here with Mr Burnaby, you suddenly decided on coming this morning?'

"To have it out with him, of course. And I - I wanted to get drunk or something. Then things were so unpleasant, you see, when we found that coat with the blood on it hanging in the closet...'

She stopped as she saw faces change, and jerked back a little.

"When you found what?' said Hadley, in the midst of a heavy silence.

'The coat with blood inside it, all stained down the inside of the front,' she answered, with something of a gulp. 'I - er - I didn't mention it, did I? Well, you didn't give me any chance! The minute we walked in here, you leaped out at us like - like - Yes, that's it! The coat was hanging up in the coat-closet in the hall. Jerome found it when he was hanging up his own.'

'Whose coat?'