A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Yellow Streak

W >> Williams, Valentine >> The Yellow Streak




"At 5.12, let us say, Bude comes back from the servants' quarters to the
hall and hears voices from the library. He closes the passage door. Is
that right?"

Bude nodded.

"It would be about two minutes after I saw Mr. Greve the first time," he
agreed.

"Very well!"

The detective resumed his reading.

5.15 P.M. Miss Trevert goes to fetch Mr. Parrish
in to tea. She finds the library door
locked. Tries the handle and hears a
shot.

5.18 (say) Miss Trevert comes into the lounge hall
and gives the alarm.

"Now, sir," said Mr. Manderton briskly, "I should like to ask you one or
two further questions. Firstly, how long were you out on your stroll in
the dark?"

"I should think about two or three minutes."

"That is to say, if you left the house by the side door at 5.10, you
were back in the house by 5.13."

"Yes, that would be right," Robin agreed.

"And what did you do when you came in?"

"I went up to my room to fetch a letter for the post."

"Miss Trevert heard the shot fired at 5.15. Where were you at that
time?"

"In my bedroom, I should say. I was there for a few minutes as I had to
write a cheque...."

"And where is your bedroom?"

"In the other wing above the billiard-room."

"Hm! A pistol shot makes a great deal of noise. It seems strange that
nobody in the house should have heard it."

Here Bude interposed.

"Mr. Parrish, sir, was very particular about noise. He had the library
door and the door leading from the front hall to the library corridor
specially felted so that he should not hear any sounds from the house
when he was working in the library. That library wing was absolutely
shut off from the rest of the house. It was always uncommon quiet...."

But the detective, ignoring him, turned to Robin again.

"I have been round the house," he said. "It does not seem to me it
ought to take you three or even two minutes to walk from the side door
to the front door. I should say it would be a matter of about thirty
seconds!"

"Excuse me," Robin answered quickly, "I didn't say I went straight from
the side to the front door. I went through the gardens following the
path that leads to the main drive. There I turned and came back to the
front door."

"And you assert that you heard nothing?"

"I heard nothing."

"Neither the 'loud voices' which the butler heard within two minutes of
your leaving the house nor the shot fired five minutes later?"

"I heard nothing."

Mr. Manderton examined the toes of his boots carefully.

"You heard nothing!" he repeated.

The door opened suddenly and Dr. Romain appeared. With him was the
village practitioner and Inspector Humphries.

Dr. Redstone carried in his hand a little pad of cotton wool. He bore it
over to the fireplace and unwrapping the lint showed a twisted fragment
of lead lying on the bloodstained dressing.

"Straight through the heart and lodged in the spine," he said. "Death
was absolutely instantaneous."

The detective picked up the bullet and scrutinized it closely.

"Browning pistol ammunition," observed Humphries; "it fits the gun he
used. There's half a dozen spare rounds in one of the drawers of his
dressing-room upstairs."

Mr. Manderton drew Inspector Humphries and Dr. Redstone into a corner of
the room where they conversed in undertones. Bude and Jay had vanished.
Dr. Romain turned to Robin Greve, who stood lost in a reverie, staring
into the fire.

"A clear case of suicide," he said. "The medical evidence is conclusive
on that point. A most amazing affair. I can't conceive what drove him to
it. Why _did_ he do it?"

"Ah! why?" said Robin.




CHAPTER X


A SMOKING CHIMNEY

A Red sun glowed dully through a thin mist when, on the following
morning, Robin Greve emerged from the side door into the gardens of
Harkings. It was a still, mild day. Moisture from the night's rain yet
hung translucent on the black limbs of the bare trees and glistened like
diamonds on the closely cropped turf of the lawn. In the air was a
pleasant smell of damp earth.

Robin paused an instant outside the door in the library corridor and
inhaled the morning air greedily. He had spent a restless, fitful night.
His sleep had been haunted by the riddle which, since the previous
evening, had cast its shadow over the pleasant house. The mystery of
Hartley Parrish's death obsessed him. If it was suicide,--and the
doctors were both positive on the point--the motive eluded him utterly.

His mind, trained to logical processes of reasoning by his practice of
the law, baulked at the theory. When he thought of Hartley Parrish as he
had seen him at luncheon on the day before, striding with his quick,
vigorous step into the room, boyishly curious to know what the _chef_
was giving them to eat, devouring his lunch with obvious animal
enjoyment, brimful of energy, dominating the table with his forceful,
eager personality....

The sound of voices in the library broke in upon his thoughts. Robin
raised his head and listened. Some one appeared to be talking in a loud
voice ... no, not talking ... rather declaiming.

Stepping quietly on the hard gravel path, Robin turned the corner of the
house and came into view of the library window. The window-pane gaped,
shattered where Horace Trevert had broken the glass on the previous
evening when effecting an entrance into the room. Framed in the ragged
outline of the splintered glass, bulked the large form of Sergeant
Harris. He stood half turned from the window so as to catch the light on
a copy of _The Times_ which he held in his red and freckled hands. He
was reading aloud in stentorian tones from a leading article.

"While this country," he bawled sonorously, "cannot ... in h'our
belief ... hevade ... er ... responsibility ... er ... h'm disquieting
sitwation ..."

"Dear me!" thought Robin to himself, "what a very extraordinary morning
pursuit for our police!"

Suddenly the reading was interrupted.

Robin heard the library door open. Then Manderton's voice cried:

"That'll do, thank you, Sergeant!"

"Did you 'ear me, sir?" asked the sergeant, who seemed very much
relieved to be quit of his task.

"Not a word!" was the reply. "But we'll try with the library door open!
I'll go back to the hall and you start again!"

A thoughtful look on his face, Robin turned quickly and, hurrying round
the side of the house, entered by the front door. Standing by the door
leading to the library corridor he found Manderton.

The detective did not seem particularly glad to see him.

"Good-morning, Inspector," said Robin affably, "you're early to work, I
see. Having a little experiment, eh?"

Manderton nodded without replying. Then the stentorian tones of Sergeant
Harris proclaiming the views of "The Thunderer" on the Silesian
situation rolled down the corridor and struck distinctly on the ears of
the listeners in the hall.

Presently Manderton closed the corridor door, shutting off the sound
abruptly.

"I think you said you could not hear the sergeant with the library door
shut?" queried Robin suavely.

"With the door shut--no," answered the detective shortly. "But with the
door open ..."

He broke off significantly and dropped his eyes to his boots.

"Would it be troubling you," Robin struck in, "if we pushed your
experiment one step farther?"

Manderton lifted his eyes and looked at the young man, Robin met his
gaze unflinchingly.

"Well?"

There was no invitation in his voice, but Robin affected to disregard
the other's coldness.

"Let the library door be shut," said Robin, "but leave the glass door
leading into the garden open. Then give Sergeant Harris another trial at
his reading...."

The detective smiled rather condescendingly.

"With the library door shut, you'll hear nothing," he remarked.

"The library window is open," Robin retorted, "or rather it is as good
as open, as one of the two big panes is smashed...."

His voice vibrated with eagerness. The detective looked at him
curiously.

"Oh, try if you like," he said carelessly.

Without waiting for his assent, Robin had already plucked open the
corridor door and was halfway down the passage as the other replied. He
was back again almost at once and, motioning the detective to silence,
took his place at his side by the open door. Then the sound of the
policeman's voice was heard from the corridor. It was muffled and
indistinct so that the sense of his words could not be made out. But the
voice was audible enough.

Robin turned to the detective.

"Bude could make out no words," he said.

"But how do we know that the glass door was open?" queried the detective
sceptically.

"Because I left it open myself," Robin countered promptly, "when I went
out for my walk before tea. Sir Horace told me that he found the door
banging about in the wind when he went out lo get into the library by
the window."

Mr. Manderton allowed his fat, serious face to expand very slowly into a
broad, superior smile.

"Doesn't it seem a little curious," he said, "that Mr. Hartley Parrish
should choose to sit and work in the library on a gusty and dark winter
evening with the window wide open? You'll allow, I think, that the
window was not broken until after his death ..."

Robin's nerves were ragged. The man's tone nettled him exceedingly. But
he confined himself to making a little gesture of impatience.

"No, no, sir," said Mr. Manderton, very decidedly, "I prefer to think
that the library door was open, left open by the party who went in to
speak to Mr. Parrish yesterday afternoon ... and who knows more about
the gentleman's suicide than he would have people think ..."

Robin boiled over fairly at this.

"Good God, man!" he exclaimed, "do you accept this theory of suicide as
blandly as all that? Have you examined the body? Don't you use your
eyes? I tell you ... bah, what's the use? I'm not here to do your work
for you!..."

"No, sir," said the detective, quite unruffled, "you are not. And I
think I'll continue to see about it myself!"

With that he opened the corridor door and vanished down the passage.

With great deliberation Robin selected a cigarette from his case, lit
it, and walked out through the front door into the fresh air again. More
than ever he felt the riddle of Hartley Parrish's death weighing upon
his mind.

His intuitive sense rebelled against the theory of suicide, despite the
medical evidence, despite the revolver in the dead man's hand, despite
the detective's assurance. And floating about in his brain, like the
gossamer on the glistening bushes in the gardens, were broken threads of
vague suspicions, of half-formed theories, leading from his hasty
observations in the death chamber ...

In itself the death of Hartley Parrish left him cold. Yes, he must admit
that. But the look in Mary Trevert's eyes, as she had urged him to
shield himself from the suspicion of having driven Hartley Parrish to
his death, haunted him. Already dimly he was beginning to realize that
Hartley Parrish in death might prove as insuperable a bar between him
and Mary Trevert as ever he had been in life ...

She was now a wealthy woman. Hartley Parrish's will had ensured that, he
knew. But it was not the barrier of riches that Robin Greve feared. He
had asked Mary Trevert to be his wife before there was any thought of
her inheriting Parrish's fortune. He derived a little consolation from
that reflection. At least he could not appear as a fortune-hunter in her
eyes. But, until he could clear himself of the suspicion lurking in Mary
Trevert's mind that he, Robin Greve, was in some way implicated in
Hartley Parrish's death, the dead man, he felt, would always stand
between them. And so ...

Robin pitched the stump of his cigarette into a rose bush with a little
gesture of resignation. Almost without knowing it, he had strolled into
the rosery up a shallow flight of steps cut into the bank of green
turf, which ran along the side of the house facing the library window to
the corner of the house where it met the clipped box-hedge of the
Pleasure Ground.

The rosery was a pleasant rectangle framed in a sort of rustic bower
which in the summer was covered with superb roses of every hue and
variety. Gravel paths intersected rose-beds cut into all manner of
fantastic shapes where stood the slender shoots of the young rose-trees
each with its tag setting forth its kind, for Hartley Parrish had been
an enthusiastic amateur in this direction.

Robin turned round and faced the house. From his elevation he could look
down into the library through the window with its shattered pane. He
could see the gleaming polish on Hartley Parrish's big desk and the
great arm-chair pushed back as Hartley Parrish had pushed it from him
just before his death.

The bare poles of the woodwork festooned with the black arms of the
creeping roses, standing out dark in the fast falling winter evening,
must, he reflected, have been the last view that Hartley Parrish had had
before ...

But then he broke off his meditations abruptly. His eye had fallen on a
narrow white patch standing out on one of the uprights supporting the
clambering roses.

It was a stout young tree, the light brown bark left adhering to its
surface. It was a long blaze on the bark on the side of the trunk which
had caught his eye. Robin walked round the gravel path until he was
within a foot of the pole to get a better view.

The pole stood almost exactly opposite the library window. The scar in
the bark was high up and diagonal and quite freshly made, for the wood
was dead white and much splintered.

The young man put a hand on the upright for support and leant forward,
carefully refraining from putting his foot on the soft brown mould of
the flower-bed which fringed the path between it and the rustic
woodwork. Then he ran lightly down the steps until he stood with his
back to the library window. From here he carefully surveyed the upright
again, then, returning to the rosery, began a careful scrutiny of the
gravel paths and the beds.

Apparently his search gave little result, for he presently abandoned it
and turned his attention to the wooden framework on the other side of
the rectangular rose-garden. He plunged boldly in among the rose-bushes
and examined each upright in turn. He spent about half an hour in this
meticulous investigation, and then, his boots covered with mould, his
rough shooting-coat glistening with moisture, he walked slowly down the
steps and reentered the house.

As he was wiping the mud off his boots on the great mat in the front
hall, Bude came out of the lounge hall with a pile of dishes on a tray.

"Bude," said Robin, "can you tell me if the fire in the library has been
smoking of late?"

"Well, sir," replied the butler, "we've always had trouble with that
chimdy when the wind's in the southwest."

"Has it been smoking lately?" The young man reiterated his question
impatiently.

The man looked up in surprise.

"Well, sir, now you come to mention it, it has. As a matter o'fact, sir,
the sweep was ordered for to-day ..."

"Why?"

"Well, sir, Mr. Parrish had mentioned it to me ..."

"When?"

The question came out like a pistol shot.

"Yesterday, sir," answered the butler blandly. "Just before luncheon, it
was, sir. Mr. Parrish told me to have that chimdy seen to at once. And I
telephoned for the sweep immediately after luncheon, sir ..."

"Did Mr. Parrish say anything else, Bude?"

Robin eagerly scanned the butler's fat, unimpressive countenance. Bude,
his tray held out stiffly in front of him, contracted his bushy eyebrows
in thought.

"I don't know as he did, sir ..."

"Think, man, think!" Robin urged.

"Well, sir," said Bude, unmoved, "I believe, now I come to think of it,
that Mr. Parrish did say something about the wind blowing his papers
about ..."

"That is to say, he had been working with the window open?"

Robin Greve's question rang out sharply. It was an affirmation more than
a question.

"Yes, sir, leastways I suppose so, sir ..."

"Which window?"

"Why, the one Mr. Parrish always liked to have open in the warm weather,
sir, ... the one opposite the desk. The other window was never opened,
sir, because of the dictaphone as stands in front of it. The damp
affects the mechanism ..."

"Thank you, Bude," said the young man.

With his accustomed majesty the butler wheeled to go. In the turn of his
head as he moved there was a faint suggestion of a shake ... a shake of
uncomprehending pity.




CHAPTER XI


"... SPEED THE PARTING GUEST!"

Dr. Romain was just finishing his breakfast as Robin Greve entered the
dining-room, a cosy oak-panelled room with a bow window fitted with
cushioned window-seats. Horace Trevert stood with his back to the fire.
There was no sign of either Lady Margaret or of Mary. Silence seemed to
fall on both the doctor and his companion as Robin came in. They wore
that rather abashed look which people unconsciously assume when they
break off a conversation on an unexpected entry.

"Morning, Horace! Morning, Doctor!" said Robin, crossing to the
sideboard. "Any sign of Lady Margaret or Mary yet?"

The doctor had risen hastily to his feet.

"I rather think Dr. Redstone is expecting me," he said rapidly; "I half
promised to go over to Stevenish ... think I'll just run over. The
walk'll do me good ..."

He looked rather wildly about him, then fairly bolted from the room.

Robin, the cover of the porridge dish in his hand, turned and stared at
him.

"Why, whatever's the matter with Romain?" he began.

But Horace, who had not spoken a word, was himself halfway to the door.

"Horace!" called out Robin sharply.

The boy stopped with his back towards the other. But he did not turn
round.

Robin put the cover back on the porridge dish and crossed the room.

"You all seem in the deuce of a hurry this morning ..." he said.

Still the boy made no reply.

"Why, Horace, what's the matter?"

Robin put his hand on young Trevert's shoulder. Horace shook him roughly
off.

"I don't care to discuss it with you, Robin!" he said.

Robin deliberately swung the boy round until he faced him.

"My dear old thing," he expostulated. "What does it all mean? _What_
won't you discuss with me?"

Horace Trevert looked straight at the speaker. His upper lip was pouted
and trembled a little.

"What's the use of talking?" he said. "You know what I mean. Or would
you like me to be plainer ..."

Robin met his gaze unflinchingly.

"I certainly would," he said, "if it's going to enlighten me as to why
you should suddenly choose to behave like a lunatic ..."

Horace Trevert leant back and thrust his hands into his pockets.

"After what happened here yesterday," he said, speaking very clearly and
deliberately, "I wonder you have the nerve to stay ..."

"My dear Horace," said Kobin quite impassively, "would you mind being a
little more explicit? What precisely are you accusing me of? What have I
done?"

"Done?" exclaimed the young man heatedly. "Done? Good God! Don't you
realize that you have dragged my sister into this wretched business?
Don't you understand that her name will be bandied about before a lot of
rotten yokels at the inquest?"

Robin Greve's eyes glittered dangerously.

"I confess," he said, with elaborate politeness, "I scarcely understand
what it has to do with me that Hartley Parrish should apparently commit
suicide within a few days of becoming engaged to your sister ..."

"Ha!"

Horace Trevert snorted indignantly.

"You don't understand, don't you? We don't understand either. But, I
must say, we thought _you_ did!"

With that he turned to go. But Robin caught him by the arm.

"Listen to me, Horace," he said. "I'm not going to quarrel with you in
this house of death. But you're going to tell here and now what you
meant by that remark. Do you understand? I'm going to know!"

Horace Trevert shook himself free.

"Certainly you shall know," he answered with _hauteur_, "but I must say
I should have thought that, as a lawyer and so on, you would have
guessed my meaning without my having to explain. What I mean is that,
now that Hartley Parrish is dead, there is only one man who knows what
drove him to his death. And that's yourself! Do you want it plainer than
that?"

Robin took a step back and looked at his friend. But he did not speak.

"And now," the boy continued, "perhaps you will realize that your
presence here is disagreeable to Mary ..."

"Did Mary ask you to tell me this?" Robin broke in.

His voice had lost its hardness. It was almost wistful. The change of
tone was so marked that it struck Horace. He hesitated an instant.

"Yes," he blurted out. "She doesn't want to see you again. I don't want
to be offensive, Robin.."

"Please don't apologize," said Greve. "I quite understand that this is
your sister's house now and, of course, I shall leave at once. I'll ask
Jay to pack my things if you could order the car ..."

The boy moved towards the door. Before he reached it Robin called him
back.

"Horace," he said pleasantly, "before you go I want you to answer me a
question. Think before you speak, because it's very important. When you
got into the library yesterday evening through the window, you smashed
the glass, didn't you?"

Horace Trevert nodded.

"Yes," he replied, looking hard at Robin.

"Why?"

"To get into the room, of course!"

"Was the window bolted?"

The boy stopped and thought.

"No," he said slowly, "now I come to think of it, I don't believe it
was. No, of course, it wasn't. I just put my arm through the broken pane
and shoved the window up. But why do you ask?"

"Oh, nothing," answered Robin nonchalantly. "I just was curious to know,
that's all!"

Horace stood and looked at him for an instant. Then he went out.

A quarter of an hour later, Hartley Parrish's Rolls-Royce glided through
the straggling main street of Stevenish. A chapel bell tinkled
unmusically, and on the pavements, gleaming with wet, went a procession
of neatly dressed townsfolk bound, prayer-book in hand, for their
respective places of worship. A newsboy, sorting out the Sunday
newspapers which had just come down by train from London, was the only
figure visible on the little station platform. Kobin bought a selection.

"There's all about Mr. Parrish," said the boy, "'im as they found dead
up at 'Arkings las' night. And the noospapers 'asn't 'arf been sendin'
down to-day ... reporters and photographers ... you oughter seen the
crowd as come by the mornin' train ..."

"I wonder what they'll get out of Manderton," commented Robin rather
grimly to himself as his train puffed leisurely, after the habit of
Sunday trains, into the quiet little station.

In the solitude of his first-class smoker he unfolded the newspapers.
None had more than the brief fact that Hartley Parrish had been found
dead with a pistol in his hand, but they made up for the briefness of
their reports by long accounts of the dead man's "meteoric career."
And, Robin noted with relief, hitherto Mary Trevert's name was out of
the picture.

He dropped the papers on to the seat, and, as the train steamed serenely
through the Sunday calm of the country towards London's outer suburbs,
he reviewed in his mind such facts as he had gleaned regarding the
circumstances of his late host's death.

He would, he told himself, accept for the time being as _facts_ what, he
admitted to himself, so far only seemed to be such. Hartley Parrish,
then, had been seated in his library at his desk with the door locked.
The fire was smoking, and therefore he had opened the window. According
to Horace Trevert, the window had not been bolted when he had entered
the library, for, after smashing the pane in the assumption that the
bolt was shot, he had had no difficulty in pushing up the window.
Hartley Parrish had opened the window himself, for on the nail of the
middle finger of his left hand Robin had seen, with the aid of the
magnifying-glass, a tiny fragment of white paint.

Who had closed it? He had no answer ready to _that_ question.

Now, as to the circumstances of the shooting. The suicide theory invited
one to believe that Hartley Parrish had got up from his desk, pushing
back his chair, had gone round it until he stood between the desk and
the window, and had there shot himself through the heart. Why should he
have done this?

Robin had no answer ready to this question either. He passed on again.
Bude had heard loud voices a very few minutes before Mary had heard the
shot. That morning's experiments had shown that Bude could have heard
these sounds only by way of the open window of the library and the open
doors of the garden and the library corridor. Additional proof, if Bude
had heard aright, that the library window was open.

Leaning back in his seat, his finger-tips pressed together, Robin Greve
resolutely faced the situation to which his deductions were leading him.

"The voice heard at the open window," he told himself, "was the voice of
the man who murdered Parrish and who closed the window, that is, of
course, if the murder theory proves more conclusive than that of
suicide."

This brought him back to his investigations in the rosery. The abrasure
he had discovered on the timber upright was the mark of a bullet and a
mark freshly made at that. Moreover, it had almost certainly been fired
from the library window--from the window which Parrish had opened; the
angle at which it had struck and marked the tree showed that almost
conclusively.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.