Murder in Peking, page 4
“As far as I know.”
Once more the death-house door was locked and the three men returned to the living-room. Street had been persuaded to go to bed, but the others were waiting up in anticipation of a questioning.
“Well, they’re gone,” said Tattershall, flinging himself into a chair. “If anybody can sleep, I should think he ought to. We’ll have a stiff day tomorrow.”
“I suppose so,” agreed Hope Johnson reluctantly. “But look here, you fellows—and you ladies, too, for that matter—hadn’t we better ask ourselves a number of questions? After all, a murder has been committed on these premises. It may have been committed by a bandit, a priest, or a policeman; but for all any of you really know about it, I may have done it myself. On the other hand, for all I know about it—”
“One of us may have done it,” finished Pilgrim. “I agree with Johnson. There’s no use blinking the facts. There’s as much likelihood that one of us did it as that a bandit or a servant did. More, maybe!”
Kate Webber was white. “I hardly think a servant—” she began, then laughed weakly. “I’m sorry! I was about to say that the servants are beyond suspicion—just as if we all weren’t!”
“I’m afraid nobody is beyond suspicion,” said Hope Johnson. “Any one of us may have had a motive for this murder, unknown to any of the others. What do any of us really know about the others?” He hesitated. “Look here, suppose I start the ball rolling with a question or two. Has any one of us a clear-cut alibi for the time of the murder? I confess I have none myself.”
“What was the time of the murder?” asked Lilleso. “Does anybody know? I was asleep when the screaming began.”
“Miss Colchis was dead when the screaming began,” said Johnson. “She had been dead for some time. An hour or more, I should think. Let’s not confuse the screaming with the murder; that’s simply silly.”
The Chinese girl was listening intently. “Since it was I who screamed—after finding the body—I think it might be assumed that I had not just committed the murder.” Her voice was slightly acid. “I doubt if I could have committed it,” she added.
Johnson nodded. “It has the appearance of a man’s crime,” he admitted. “And, superficially, there is no reason to suppose you called attention to a murder you had yourself committed. However—”
“I might have,” she smiled bitterly. “It might have been a trick—and the Chinese are very tricky. That’s what you are thinking, I suppose.”
“My dear girl,” protested Johnson, “I’m not thinking anything of the sort.”
“I am not your dear girl, Mr. Johnson; and I didn’t murder poor Allie Colchis. But I should be quite willing to murder whoever did. The Chinese are very murderous!” She shrugged her slim shoulders. “Well, here is my story. I came in late—quite late, I believe—I’m afraid I don’t know the exact hour; but it was—”
“It was about two-thirty, dear,” said Kate Webber. “I was lying awake, and I heard you. You were with Blanche and Orrin, weren’t you?”
“That’s right.” It was Tattershall who answered. “We all came down the hill together. Blanche and I had been for a ramble in the moonlight; and as we approached the temple we ran across Miss Li. We finished up together.”
The Chinese girl agreed. “I passed through Allie’s room into my own,” she continued. “There was no light and I didn’t need one. But I spoke to her as I went through; I asked her if she was asleep. There wasn’t any answer, and I went into my own room and undressed.”
“In the dark?” asked Johnson.
“Of course, in the dark. Why not? There was a little moonlight; and anyway I knew where everything was. The servants had laid out my pyjamas on the bed, and my slippers were beside it. I got into bed and pulled up the covers, and just then I thought I heard Allie speak to me. So I sat up and called back to her. She didn’t answer, and I wondered if she was ill. I got up and lighted a candle and went into her room—and I found her there—dead.”
“You hadn’t really heard her call, then,” suggested Pilgrim, kindly.
“She couldn’t have,” said Johnson, “if it was immediately after that she screamed. Miss Colchis had been dead at least an hour, I tell you.”
“Are you certain of that, Johnson?”
“Absolutely certain. If Miss Colchis had just then been murdered, Miss Li would have heard the commotion; if she had just then been murdered the body would have been less cold and rigid than I found it. A certain rigor was just beginning to set in.”
Pilgrim nodded. He knew all about that; he had often used the familiar sentence in print.
“I did hear her call,” said Yi Li quietly; “I’m quite certain I did.” Her dark eyes flashed. “Even if she had been dead an hour! She was my friend—and in China we understand these things.”
They looked at her in silence for a moment.
“Oh, please!” begged Johnson. But it was an eerie note that had been struck. Nobody was quite comfortable afterward.
It developed that nobody actually had an alibi. Thurston had been with Miss Colchis in the pavilion until they were joined by Lilleso; then all three had returned to the house and played bridge with Jerome Street as a fourth. Shortly afterward the countess’s visiting party had returned and by one o’clock everybody, presumably, but Yi Li, Blanche Windom, and Tattershall had retired to his rooms. The murder might have occurred at almost any time thereafter, except that—if Hope Johnson’s dogmatic assertion was correct—it probably had occurred about half-past one. As the victim was alone at that time, in her corner of the courtyard, almost anyone might have slipped in on her unobserved.
Hope Johnson was persistent. “Then we must rack our brains for something that may tell against each other,” he said. “Didn’t anybody hear his neighbor leave the house? For instance, I heard Osgood leave his room shortly after we retired. He—”
“I ran like hell around the compound, strangled the poor girl in her sleep, and was back again in five minutes,” said Selden Osgood amiably. “How quickly you solve these problems, my dear fellow!”
Johnson grinned. “You went into the bathroom and drank about a quart of water and were back in about three minutes,” he corrected. “I was about to add that.”
“Damn!” said Osgood. “I was almost certain I’d done it.”
The Chinese girl continued to be bitter. “Aren’t we all witty and amusing,” she sneered, “with that poor girl lying dead!”
Osgood had the grace to blush. “I’m sorry,” he shrugged..“You’re right, of course. I don’t think any of us are as callous as we sound, Miss Li. We’re just tired, and a little sick, and our nerves are on edge. Talking nonsense is a release.”
“I can’t help feeling that it’s all my fault,” Kate Webber said miserably. “I put her in that room—with Yi, of course; but—two girls—alone! Even if Yi had been there—”
“Good Lord!” cried Thurston. “That was the room—?”
“Of course,” she said, without catching the trend of his thought. “I told you I was having the servants remove your bags, you remember. There was a long mirror I thought the girls would like.”
Pilgrim, too, was interested. The eyes of the two men met in a look of curious inquiry.
It was Thurston who put the thought into words. “My God, Pilgrim,” he said, in a low voice, “is it possible that this was intended for me?”
Kate Webber suddenly remembered. “Oh!” she cried.
“I had forgotten about the change in rooms,” the antiquarian continued. “Miss Webber mentioned it after dinner. This is dreadful, Pilgrim! I can never forgive myself.”
A shocked silence settled like darkness on the room. Hope Johnson was troubled. He rose to his feet and paced restlessly to the door and back again. Lora Pilgrim, asleep in her chair, had heard nothing for several minutes.
A harsh laugh broke the spell, and all eyes suddenly were looking at Blanche Windom. Her little-girl lips were curved derisively downward.
“Ask Tattershall where he was for an hour or two to-night,” she suggested. “He wasn’t with me every minute of the time.”
“Why, you disreputable—!”
Words failed the angry explorer. His monocle fell from his eye to the rug, and he stooped for it, muttering. For a moment an ugly scene impended. Then Blanche Windom laughed again, and they were permitted to believe—if anybody cared to—that she had just been joking.
Hope Johnson spoke dryly. “I think Osgood was right about our nerves. It might be a good idea for all of us to go to bed.”
3.
Lying quietly on his cot, in darkness, Johnson found it difficult to get to sleep. His mind raced with the possibilities of the extraordinary situation in which, by accident, he found himself. The quality of nightmare in the episode persisted; only in China, he supposed, could such things occur with such immoral plausibility. A Danish girl of quite remarkable beauty—dead in a rented temple in the hills—and already superstition was weaving a fabric of mystical significance around the crime.
The suspects were as fantastic as the setting: the curator of a famous museum, a world-renowned explorer, an amiable and popular writer of detective-stories, a Hollywood director—not to mention the others, who were almost equally bizarre and equally were objects of suspicion. Priests, bandits, and policemen! an incredible group. And in the background, the shadowy figures of Thurston’s mysterious pursuers.
How long had Kate Webber been acquainted with Allie Colchis, and what did she know about the girl from Copenhagen? he wondered. About any of her guests, for that matter. By what system of selection did she invite them? He, himself, had been invited without particular discrimination because he had met Lora Pilgrim at an Embassy tea—and Lora Pilgrim had apparently liked him. Through her, he had been invited to the temple week-end.
About the rented temple itself there appeared to be no mystery. Scores of them in the hills were similarly leased; it was the way old sanctuaries were kept up. Founded centuries agone by tired functionaries of the palace—emperor, viceroy or eunuch, weary of the vanities of earth—who devoted the peculations of a lifetime to raising temples which should be at once lasting memorials in this world and passports to the next—many of the old places had been saved from ruin by incongruous Christian dollars. He had read about them in the guidebooks.
Although it was still dark, the hours were creeping on toward daylight. The doors of the dormitory stood open to the night. A cool breeze was blowing across his chamber, and Johnson drew the sheet about his shoulders. On either side of him, from time to time, were intimate sounds of occupancy—the creaking of a cot as Lilleso turned over in his sleep, and the sonorous snoring of the asthmatic Osgood. Was anybody but himself awake and pondering? The murderer, perhaps, supposing him to be on the premises? But murderers were not always sleeps less, he reflected; they slept as easily perhaps as babes, in the serene reaction of accomplishment. Whose were the footprints in the room of idols?
The temple dogs were doleful in the distance. Somewhere he seemed to hear the beat of gongs. Then close at hand a dog was barking wrathfully—the angry uproar was almost in the court. He sat up quickly, listening. After a moment he flung back the sheet and stepped out on the floor.
Somebody was in the courtyard, walking softly on the stones. The light ‘scluff-scluff’ of feet was plainly audible. Hope Johnson stepped swiftly to the door and looked out across the quadrangle; but there was nobody in view. He returned and fumbled softly for his slippers; then he seized his flashlight from the bed-table and went out into the night.
All sound had ceased, however. The dog no longer howled. The wide courtyard was lonely as a tomb.
He crossed diagonally to the gate that gave onto the quadrangle and turned his flashlight down the flight of steps; but there was no movement anywhere. Returning, he skirted the edges of the court and pushed out into the No-man’s land, behind the temple, that led upward to the temple of the priests. The moon had slipped from view and the unrivalled stars seemed to drop down to the very edges of the neighboring ravine. In their radiance the opposite slopes were white, as if iced by snow, save for the great dark wrinkles in the mountain’s face. Far below he caught the glint and murmur of a stream. It was a night for romantic adventure perhaps, but not detection.
Young Mr. Johnson sighed and turned away. Up the hillside, all seemed quiet now at the temple of the priests; even the dogs were silent. He returned to his own courtyard, by an aftergate, and halted suddenly in shadow.
The figure of a man was slipping quietly along the borders of the quadrangle; apparently he was making for the small dormitory in the southeast corner, which was occupied only by the body of Allie Colchis. The light shuffle of his footsteps was clearly audible in the silence; but though he moved unhurriedly it was not possible to name him. Long lines of starlight lay across the edges of the courtyard, strained through the branches of the fringing trees, so that the figure passed bafflingly through light and shadow. It was obvious that it might have been coming from almost any building in the courtyard, save only the women’s quarters. On the other hand, Johnson reflected, it might have been coming from the gate.
There was little doubt, he thought, that it was some member of the week-end party. Tattershall? Thurston? Pilgrim? Even Lilleso perhaps? They were all men somewhat of a size and weight. And the fellow, like himself, seemed to be clad in slippers and pyjamas. Oddly, he was carrying something that resembled a single slipper in his hand. Was it a slipper? It was, a shoe of some sort, anyway! And had this apparition preceded or followed him to the courtyard?
Hope Johnson’s thumb was on the button of his torch; but he did not press it. After all, this was no proof of murder. It was just an incident that called for explanation. He moved forward in the darkness, in pursuit, hugging the borders of the court.
At the entrance to the death-chamber the intruder paused and fumbled with the lock; then the door swung inward and he disappeared. Hope Johnson, crossing swiftly to the spot, found the door closed and locked as tightly as he had left it an hour and more before. For a minute he stood in the little passage outside the room and watched a light that came and went inside, making itself visible through the crack beneath the door. Already, perhaps, the murderer had returned to the scene of his crime—yet it seemed a blatant thing to do.
Somebody, at any rate, was locked in with the corpse. For the first time, a little smile crossed Johnson’s face. It was a piquant situation. All he need do was wait for the fellow to come out.
But there were those other rooms beyond the death-chamber, and that other exit—through the old rooms now stuffed with idols and débris. It was obvious that the intruder had a key.
The key—that was the answer to the question. He had, himself, locked the death-house after the departure of the policemen, and given the key to his hostess. In her turn, she had placed it on a table in the living-room, in view of everybody present. Somebody had seen the action and had removed it. Now he must replace it or stand revealed.
Greatly pleased with himself, young Mr. Johnson slipped back across the courtyard and into the deserted living-room. He flashed his torch on the little table where the key had been. The thing was definitely missing.
At one side of the long room a couch invited. He was tired. He would curl up on the couch and wait. Then—at the end of his long beam of light—what revelation?
He curled up on the couch and went immediately to sleep.
4.
Lora Pilgrim, too, was troubled in the night. A dream assailed her, in which a seller of dragons came to her and said: ‘I would like you to buy my mother. She is advanced in years and I will sell her to you cheap. Please feed her well and take care not to let her suffer any hardship. If you will do this, you will not be sorry.’ But when she indicated that she was willing to accept this responsibility, the dragon came in through the window and looked at her with the hard face of Blanche Windom. There was a monocle in her eye and her tail was long and scaly. The dragon-seller, meanwhile, had somehow become the young American, Hope Johnson; at her cry of recognition he burst into a shout of laughter, saying: ‘You see how simple, really, it all is, Miss Colchis. The fellow wasn’t wearing any trousers!’ Then she knew that she, herself, was Allie Colchis, and that she was dead.
Struggling upward from vast deeps of horror, she burst into life with a strangled cry and sat up starkly. Darkness lay all around her, wrapping her in a suffocating veil. She felt, vaguely, however, that something had awakened her; and her subconscious mind associated it with the living-room, which lay beyond the little library in which she slept.
The shocking dream persisted in her memory and she blushed, remembering it. Its connotations, she felt sure, were ugly and obscene. She would never dare to mention it, lest someone tell her what it meant. Hope Johnson, perhaps, who had a fund of curious, miscellaneous information that was frequently disquieting.
Untimelily, she recalled his remarks, one evening, about ghosts. He had dismissed the whole realm of the supernatural as so much ‘candlepower.’ Electric lighting, he said, when it became general, would lay all the ghosts in China. ‘You can’t have ghosts without candles!’
That had been in a dwelling wired for electricity; not an eighth-century monastery, lighted by oil lamps and—yes, candles—in which a hideous murder had occurred.
However, she was inclined to like Hope Johnson. There was something reassuring in his loose-jointed American lankiness and the boyish grin that sometimes broke through his selfconscious solemnity. Her uncle, she knew, thought him a shade too cocky.
What was it she had been thinking about the living-room? There was no one sleeping there, of course. She had considered sleeping there, herself, but had thought the library snugger. Across the room Kate Webber slumbered heavily, worn out with grief and worry. No point in waking her.
