The Moon Rock by Arthur J. Rees (e novels to read TXT) 📗

downstairs?”

“Maybe it is. I’ve got it shut up in the cellar.”

“Whose dog is it?”

“His.” Thalassa’s eyes travelled towards Robert Turold’s bedroom.

“Is it howling through grief?”

“More like from fright. Dogs are like people, frightened of their own shadows, sometimes. I shut it up because it kept trying to get upstairs to his room. It’s a queer surly sort of brute, but fond enough of him. He used to take it out for long walks.”

“What kind of dog is it?”

“A retriever.”

“So that’s all that happened that night, is it?” said Barrant, in a meditative voice. “You have told me all?”

Thalassa nodded. His brown face remained expressionless, but his little dark eyes glittered warily, like a snake’s.

“Think again, Thalassa,” urged Barrant, in a voice of the softest insistence. “It may be that you have forgotten something—overlooked an incident which may be important.”

“I’ve overlooked nothing,” was the sullen response.

“There’s just an odd chance that you have,” said Barrant, searching the other’s face from raised contemplative eyebrows. “The best of memories plays tricks at times. It’s always better not to be too sure. Think again, Thalassa, if you haven’t something more to tell me.”

“I’ve told you everything,” Thalassa commenced, then straightened his long bony frame in a sudden access of anger, and brought his hand sharply down on the table. “What are you trying to badger me for, like this? You’ll get nothing more out of me if you question me till Doomsday.”

“But why should you keep anything back?” asked Barrant softly.

Thalassa looked at him with a startled air, then recovered himself quickly. “I’m not keeping anything back,” he said. “Why should you say that?”

“I did not say it. You said I’d get no more out of you.”

“Because there is nothing more to be got. Is that plain enough?”

“Quite. Well then, let us go over the events of this night once more. Perhaps that will help you to recall something which you have forgotten.”

“That’s not likely.”

“Nevertheless, we will try. You were busy in the coal cellar at the time, I think you said?”

“At what time?” said Thalassa with a quick glance.

“At the time the crash happened upstairs.”

“Yes.”

“What time was that?”

“How should I know? Do you suppose there’s a clock in the coal cellar? It must have been about half-past nine.”

“According to the clock upstairs. Did you think I had overlooked that? Then you heard your wife call, and went to the kitchen. Next, you went upstairs, tried your master’s door, found it locked, and decided to go for assistance. But before you could do so Mr. and Mrs. Pendleton and Dr. Ravenshaw arrived. Have I got it right?”

“That be right.”

“All except one thing, Thalassa.”

Thalassa met Barrant’s look steadily, with no sense of guilt in his face. “Well?” he said.

“I see that you do not intend to be frank. Let me help your memory a little. Did you have no other visitors—before Mr. and Mrs. Pendleton and Dr. Ravenshaw arrived?”

“Visitors?” There was scorn now in his straight glance, but nothing more. “Is this a place where there’s likely to be visitors?”

“Not in the ordinary course of events”—Barrant was still smilingly affable—“but the night your master met his death was not an ordinary night. Somebody may have come to the house.”

He paused, again searching for some sign of guilty consciousness in the face revealed in such clear outline near him, but saw none. Again, Thalassa met him with answering look, but remained mute.

“Thalassa”—Barrant’s voice remained persuasive, but to an ear attuned to shades, there was a note of menace underlying its softness—“you know there was somebody else here that night.”

“Somebody? Who?”

“Your master’s daughter—Miss Sisily Turold.” Barrant brought it out sharply and angrily.

Thalassa turned a cold glance on him. “If you know that why do you ask me?” he said.

“Because you let her in!”

Thalassa surveyed him with the shadow of a smile on his motionless face. “Do you take me for a fool?” he said. “I let nobody in.”

“Thalassa,” said the detective earnestly, “let me advise you, for your own sake, to tell the truth now. You may be keeping silence through some mistaken idea of loyalty to your master’s daughter, but that will do her no good, nor you either. I know more than you think. If you persist in keeping silent you will put yourself in an awkward position, and it may be the worse for you. You were seen listening at the door of the room downstairs on the day of your master’s death.”

“So that’s it, is it? You think you’ll fit a rope round my neck? I’m to say what you want to save it? To hell with you and your policeman’s tricks! I don’t care that for them.” He snapped his long brown fingers in Barrant’s face.

“You’ve a bold tongue, you scoundrel,” said Barrant, flushing angrily. “Take care where it leads you. Once more, will you tell me the truth?”

“I’ve told you all I know.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you did not see your master’s daughter, or let her into the house?”

“I did not.”

“Could anybody have got into the house without your knowledge?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you hear anybody?”

“How could I hear anybody when I was down in the coal cellar?”

The open sneer on Thalassa’s face suggested that he was not to be caught by verbal traps. Barrant perceived, with a smouldering anger, that the man was too clever to be tricked, and too stout of heart to be frightened. By accident or design he had a ready story which was difficult to demolish without further knowledge of the events of that night. Barrant decided that it would be useless, at that moment, to apply himself to the effort of worming anything out of Thalassa. He had shown his own hand too freely, and placed him on his guard. There was also the bare possibility that he had told the truth, so far as he knew it. One last shot he essayed.

“You are acting very foolishly, but I shall not arrest you—yet,” he said impressively. “I shall tell the local police to keep an eye on you.”

“Is it the Cornish savage from the churchtown—him with the straw helmit?” said Thalassa, with a harsh laugh.

The last shot had missed fire badly. The lawless spirit of the man was not to be intimidated by a threat of arrest—a threat which the detective had reason for not putting into effect just then. Barrant moved towards the door with the best dignity he could command.

“Light me downstairs to the kitchen,” he said. “I want to see your wife.”

Thalassa seemed about to say something at that, then thought the better of it, and walked out of the room. Outside in the passage he picked up a small lamp glimmering in a niche of the wall, and led the way downstairs. They reached the kitchen in silence, and went in.

The little grey woman at the table was seated in the same posture as Barrant had last seen her, her hands crossed in front of her, her head bent. She glanced up listlessly as they entered. Barrant crossed the room, and touched her arm. She shook in a pitiful little flurry of fear, then became motionless again.

“Mrs. Thalassa, I want to speak to you,” said Barrant, raising his voice, as though to a deaf person. “Is this where you were sitting the night before last, when you heard the crash in your master’s room upstairs?”

“Put the knave on the rubbish heap,” she muttered without looking up.

“Listen to me, Mrs. Thalassa”—he spoke still louder. “Did you hear the shot before the crash?”

The loud tone seemed to reach the remote consciousness of her being, and she started up in another flurry. … “Coming, coming, sir. Jasper, where’s the tray?…” she stood thus for a moment, then dropped back into her chair, her eyes fixed on the opposite wall.

“What’s the matter with her?” said Barrant, turning to her husband.

“She’s been like it ever since it happened,” said Thalassa, in a low tone. “That’s how I found her when I came from the cellar.”

“Did she hear the shot—or see anything?”

“That’s more than I can tell you. When I came from the cellar she seemed mazed with fright, and kept pointing to the ceiling. All I could make out from her was that there’d been a great crash upstairs. When I came down again after trying the door she was lying on the floor in a faint, and I carried her in to her bed. It’s floored her wits.”

“She’s had a very bad shock,” said Barrant gravely. He regarded her attentively, her vacant eyes, mouthing lips, trembling hands, her uncanny fixed glance which seemed to behold something unseen. Strange suspicions flowed through his brain as he watched her. What terrible experience had befallen her? What did she know of the mysterious events that had happened in that silent house? He endeavoured to follow the direction of her gaze, but it seemed to be fixed on the row of bells behind the kitchen door. Then, like a half-awakened sleeper released from the horror of a nightmare, she sank back in her previous listless attitude, and fell to muttering again.

As Barrant watched her, Thalassa watched them both with an anxiety which would have aroused Barrant’s suspicions if he had seen it. But Thalassa’s face was again closely guarded when he did look up.

“You’ll get neither rhyme nor reason out of her,” said Thalassa, as their glances met.

“I’ll try once more,” murmured Barrant, almost to himself. He turned to her again, but this time he did not lay his hand on her arm. “Mrs. Thalassa”—he spoke more gently—“will you try and understand me?”

“Red on black … black on red.” Her hands moved restlessly.

In a sudden recognition of the futility of trying to gather anything from that clouded brain, Barrant turned abruptly away without another word. And the black gaze of Thalassa followed him through the door and out into the darkness of the night.

Chapter XVII

The bell in the darkened chambers rang with the insistent clamour of mechanism responding with blind obedience to a human hand, but Mr. Anthony Brimsdown suffered it to pass unnoticed. As an elderly bachelor, living alone, he was sufficiently master of his own affairs to disregard the arrival of the last post, leaving the letters as they were tumbled through the slit in the door downstairs until he felt inclined to go and get them.

He was standing in the centre of the room examining an unusual trinket—a gold hoop like a bracelet, with numbers and the zodiac signs engraved on the inner surface. Mr. Brimsdown had discovered it in a Kingsway curiosity shop a week before. It was a portable sun-dial of the sixteenth century. A slide, pushed back a certain distance in accordance with the zodiac signs, permitted the sun to fall through a slit on the figures of the hours within—a dainty timekeeper for mediaeval lovers. Mr. Brimsdown was no gallant, nor had he sufficient imagination to prompt him to wonder what dead girl’s dainty fingers had once held up the bright fragile circle to the sun to see if Love’s tryst was to be kept. His joy in the sun-dial was the pride of the collector in the possession of a rare thing.

But that night it failed to interest him. He put it down with a sigh, and resumed his restless pacing of the room.

It was his office, but he preferred it to his chambers at the end of the passage. He said the air was better, but it is doubtful whether that was the reason. Perhaps Mr. Brimsdown felt less lonely among his legal documents, meditating over battles he had won for dead legatees. As a solicitor he was “strong on the Chancery side” and had gained some famous judgments for notorious litigants—men who had loved the law so well that their souls might well have been found—knowing no higher heaven—in the office where the records of their forgotten lawsuits were buried. And in death, as in life, they would have been glad to confide their affairs to the man whose lot it had been to add “Deceased” to so many of the names on the black steel deed-boxes which lined the shelves.

Mr. Brimsdown lived for the law. As a family lawyer he was the soul of discretion, an excellent fighter, wary and reticent, deep as the grave, but far safer. The grave sometimes opens and divulges a ghastly secret from its narrow depths. There was no chance of getting anything out of Mr. Brimsdown, dead or alive. He had no wife to extract bedroom confidences from him, no relations to visit in expansive moments, he trusted nothing to paper or diary, and he did not play golf. He was a solitary man, of an habitual secretiveness deepened by years of living alone.

His lips moved