The Studio Crime Read online

  “It might be a flag of truce from the powers of darkness.”

  “Yes,” said Serafine. “But it’s not. It’s something quite ordinary. It’s a man’s muffler.”

  Even as she spoke they heard the sound of scrunching gravel and a cough.

  “Of course,” said Newtree in a puzzled tone, as if these flights of fancy were beyond him, “it’s Merewether or Steen—or both of them,” he added, as two dimly-outlined figures moved past the window and the ghost of a genial laugh was heard.

  “Steen!” echoed Dr. Mordby, dropping for a moment his mask of god-like wisdom and looking quite humanly interested. “Is that—the Steen?”

  Yes, I suppose so,” said Laurence mildly. “Sir Marion Steen.”

  The surprise on the doctor’s face gave way slowly to the look that the mention of Sir Marion’s name often brought to the faces of ambitious men—a look far-away yet intent, as if he were doing sums in his head.

  “Fancy,” said Mrs. Wimpole dreamily, “I read in the paper the other day that he’d just given five thousand pounds towards pulling down St. Paul’s and ten thousand towards rebuilding the bungalows round Stonehenge. Or was it the other way about, Serafine? I can’t follow all these modern movements. Anyway, it must be very delightful to have so much money.”

  She gave a faintly envious sigh and relapsed into her usual ruminant silence, preserving her youth and beauty as the latest method was, by sitting quite still and smiling and keeping the mind a blank.

  “Now we’ve seen the worst,” said John Christmas jovially, “shall we draw the curtains, Newtree? This fog of yours, Serafine, is worming its way into the room.”

  He pulled the cord and the Bokhara hangings swung softly together, lighting up the great untidy studio with their rich warm colours and making a bizarre frame for Serafine’s black head and sallow face and tall gaunt figure in its yellow shawl. The fog hung thinly in the room, the finest possible mist, up through which drifted here and there the blue arabesques of cigarette smoke. The great open fire in the brick hearth crackled and blazed valiantly as if to dispel with its bright light and homely associations the mystery, the eeriness of the fog. Newtree’s old servant pulled aside the tapestry at the door and announced:

  “Sir Marion Steen and Dr. Merewether.”

  It was plain to see, from the servant’s interested glance at the elder of the two men, which was Sir Marion, the great financier. But it was Dr. Merewether, a local practitioner, a poor man and without distinction in his profession, who better looked the part. One found it hard to believe, at first sight of Sir Marion’s gentle, scholarly, rather dreamy face, that he was one of the great commercial figures of his generation. He had started on the road to millionairedom with a small hardware shop in an east coast town; or so rumour had it, and Sir Marion gave smiling countenance to rumour. The shop had become, in the course of not so very many years, a combine; and the small ironmonger had become the director of a dozen companies, a knight, and a millionaire celebrated for his philanthropy. The Steen homes of rest for the impecunious aged were almost as well known as Dr. Barnardo’s orphanages, and the tracts of beautiful country snatched by Sir Marion from the threatening jerry-builder and presented to the National Trust now ran into many thousands of acres. In an uncertain and gullible fashion, the mild-mannered little millionaire was also a patron of the arts, and a fairly familiar figure in the studios of Chelsea and St. John’s Wood.

  Merewether, on the other hand, had the strong, self-reliant face and assured taciturn manner more often associated with worldly success than failure. A tall, lanky figure with a reserved but observant air and a face that kept in repose a melancholy, but not in the least fretful, expression. A faint ironic smile appeared for an instant in his eyes as Simon Mordby, after an effusive greeting of Sir Marion, gave him two fingers and a patronizing nod with a mechanical: “Well, Merewether, well!” and a quickly-turned shoulder. Dr. Mordby had little use for any member of his own profession, and no use at all for those without money or influence.

  Turning aside, Dr. Merewether encountered the reflection of his own faint smile in Miss Wimpole’s bright, observant eyes and moved towards her.

  “How delightful,” he remarked, “to come in out of the fog to the crackle and blaze of a log fire! It is like coming back to life from among the Shades.”

  “Ah!” said Serafine, “I see that you properly appreciate our London fogs. We were talking about it before you came in, and the way ordinary things become strange and terrible. Was it you or Sir Marion whose white muffler drifted across the courtyard like a small wandering ghost?”

  “It was I,” replied the doctor with his melancholy smile. “I had an experience of the same kind as I came up the road. I could see the outline of a man moving towards me with what seemed to be an extraordinarily elongated narrow head. It was like some dreadful malformation. I almost crossed the road to avoid meeting him. My flesh positively crept. Yet it was nothing but a man—a foreigner probably, but quite an ordinary harmless fellow-mortal wearing a Turkish fez. An unusual sight, but not an alarming one. He asked me the way to Golders Green,” added Merewether pensively.

  “Why!” exclaimed Sir Marion, turning from the inspection of a portfolio of etchings, “I met the same man in Greentree Road soon before I caught up with you. And he asked me the way to Golders Green!

  “I’m sorry he didn’t find me explicit enough. But he didn’t seem to be very well acquainted with the English language.”

  Newtree remarked thoughtfully:

  “Some queer friend of Frew’s, I shouldn’t wonder. Frew has all sorts of queer callers—carpet-dealers and Jew merchants of all kinds. By the way, I’ve got an invitation to take you all up to his studio later on in the evening to have a look at his collection. He has some of the most wonderful old rugs in the world and all sorts of eastern things. If you’d all care to go...”

  He looked diffidently round at his guests, and there was a chorus of polite and pleased assent. Only Mrs. Wimpole, turning upon Laurence a reproachful glance from her beautiful, stupid, light-grey eyes, asked plaintively:

  “Is it far?”

  “Not very,” said Laurence with a smile. “Just up a flight of stairs. He has the studio above this one. Rather an interesting chap—seems to have travelled pretty well all over the world. He hasn’t been here very long, not more than about ten months. He really has the most marvellous collection of—”

  With his feeling that Miss Wimpole was the guest of the evening and must at all costs be kept entertained, Laurence began to address himself to her. He broke off as he found that she was not listening, but was looking aside with a curious, intrigued expression on her plain, lively face. Following the direction of her bright glance he saw that it was Dr. Merewether who had attracted her attention.

  Dr. Merewether was standing quite still and looking across the studio. His face was profoundly sad. Standing with his elbow resting on the mantelpiece and his fingers running up into his hair he had the look of a man without hope or spirit who sees through the coloured kaleidoscope of life to some dark perpetual vision of despair. His thin lips were pressed together in a grim line and the deep vertical furrow between his brows looked like the fingerprints of a passing daemon.

  Serafine and Newtree looked at one another without speaking, but each recognized in the other the same curiosity, the same surprise and sympathy. Then, suddenly alarmed to find that he was gazing silently into the strange lady’s eyes, Newtree started, dropped his eyeglasses and with a stammer concluded his sentence:

  “—the most marvellous collection of Persian rugs. I should especially like you to see—”

  Dr. Mordby had manoeuvred Sir Marion into a corner and with long suave periods was doing his practised best to impress that gentleman with the social and scientific importance of Dr. Mordby.

  “Lord Shottery is very interested in the scheme. You and I, Sir Marion, realize that the science of psychology is practically an unploughed field. Just surface-scratched
at present...”

  Sir Marion listened with his fresh, gentle face tilted and a pleased, benevolent smile on his lips. He had never outgrown an ingenuous pleasure in his personage-ship. Flattery could draw inexhaustibly on his good humour, but not, as his flatterers were wont ruefully to discover, on his banking-account.

  Mrs. Wimpole, opening her placid eyes to find Newtree and Serafine deep in conversation, remarked suddenly and confidentially to Christmas:

  “I do wish, John, you could persuade Serafine to have her hair waved and not to wear such outré clothes. And not to think so much. It makes her thin and prevents her from getting married. It’s no use my talking to Serafine. I might as well be a pelican crying from the house-tops...”

  Laurence, glancing around at his guests, felt that his little party was not going so badly. Their voices rose and fell in a subdued, pleasant hum. No sound of traffic or footsteps penetrated into quiet Madox Court. The studio was a little oasis of warmth and chatter in a world of chill fog and silence.

  Suddenly, from somewhere outside the oasis, breaking with uncanny effect across its gay atmosphere, there came a long muffled sound that broke at the end like a gasping cry. Long after it had died away it seemed still to go on, spreading fainter and wider waves of sound through Newtree’s studio as a stone spreads ripples in a pond.

  Chapter II

  Upstairs

  In the sudden hush Dr. Simon Mordby’s voice went on with an effect of shouting:

  “Lord Shottery was much impressed with the scheme. If I may, Sir Marion, I will send you—”

  He became suddenly aware that Sir Marion was inattentively gazing upwards and that everybody but himself had fallen silent. He left his sentence hanging in mid-air and looked like the others up at the blank white ceiling. John Christmas was the first to recover himself.

  “The pelican crying from the house-tops,” he murmured softly. “Listen for the sparrow answering from the wilderness.”

  Laurence removed his glasses and looked round at the hesitant faces of his guests.

  “It sounded to me,” he said diffidently, “rather like a chair being pushed back. Frew has a parquet floor. I often wish he’d have castors put on his chairs.”

  “Why,” said Sir Marion gently, as if to help Laurence to dispel any disquietude the ladies of the party might be feeling, “I thought it was a loud yawn. The sort of loud yawn a person gives when he’s alone and can take pleasure in yawning.”

  Mrs. Wimpole, wide-eyed and placid, asked of the world in general:

  “What was that?”

  And Dr. Mordby, puzzled and rather annoyed at this interruption, of her in particular:

  “What was what?”

  Serafine said nothing. She was looking from under her lashes at Dr. Merewether, whose self-contained personality seemed to have great interest for her. He was the least excited of the party, remarking with polite professional calm:

  “I’ll go up and see if everything’s all right, Newtree. I know Frew. He’s a patient of mine.”

  Mordby, seeing him move without haste towards the door, began:

  “Let me accompany you...” but Merewether answered tranquilly:

  “No, thanks. It would be too much of an inquisition if two of us went, I think. I shan’t be long.”

  “Tell him to put rubber castors on his chairs,” said Newtree cheerily. He still felt that it was his duty to dispel the slight chill, the sense of something wrong which that muffled sound had projected into the studio. His guests, however, did not seem to want it dispelled. Their talk was desultory, and they watched the door for Merewether’s return. When he appeared after a moment or two, as composed and leisurely as ever, there was a perceptible disappointment in the faces turned towards him.

  “Well?”

  “Frew says he heard nothing,” said Merewether in his low, deliberate voice. “He said it was probably the wind in the chimney. And he’s expecting us all to go up in half an hour or so.”

  “The wind!” echoed Dr. Mordby. “My dear sir, there’s no wind to-night!”

  “That,” replied Merewether sedately, “is just what I told him. And he said in that case it was probably a banshee.”

  “Oh, very likely, very likely!” murmured Mordby absent-mindedly and returned with zest to the conquest of Sir Marion Steen. Otherwise the conversation languished half-heartedly for a moment or two, as if they were all thinking of something else.

  “What children we all are!” thought Serafine, half amused, half disgusted. “How we love a sensation! How we hate to be cheated of one!”

  She turned towards Merewether, who had gone back to his place at the mantelpiece; and at that moment she herself had a sensation, one of those sensations that were the breath of life to her as a novelist. On the doctor’s calm and rather arrogant face there were tiny beads of sweat, and the cigarette he was holding between his fingers was quite flattened out by the pressure of his half-clenched hand.

  “Dr. Merewether,” she said softly.

  He turned towards her with a smooth, courteous movement, and smiled. But at her steady, thoughtful glance a queer expression came momentarily into his eyes—a look half appealing, half inimical, as though he defied her to read his thoughts. Serafine, whose curiosity about her fellow-creatures was insatiable, and who, at first sight of him, had thought the doctor easily the most unusual and interesting person in the room, beckoned him to her side. With a good deal of the novelist’s complacent interest in other people’s troubles and a little of the sympathy of a kindly if hard-headed woman, she wanted to hear him talk. He came, his face an agreeable if rather melancholy mask.

  “Tell me,” said Serafine, making room for him on the settee, “something about Gordon Frew. What’s he like?”

  Merewether paused, then replied expressionlessly:

  “Tall, with a black beard.”

  “Have you read the book about Persia he published a month or two ago?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “Some of it. I thought it rather dull, to tell the truth.”

  “Oh.”

  “What does he do besides collecting rugs?”

  The doctor smiled.

  “Collects bronzes.”

  “And?”

  “Collects Buddhas.”

  Serafine laughed.

  “And is that all you can tell me?”

  Merewether smiled politely, but his glance strayed as though this personal conversation displeased or bored him.

  “Why, yes, that’s all. I hardly know him, except—” He stopped a moment and went on levelly: “Except in my professional capacity.”

  “Oh,” said Serafine, noting his restless glance and maliciously prolonging the conversation to punish him for it. “Now I’ll tell you what you’ve told me. He’s travelled a lot. He’s acquisitive, like all of us. He has money, unlike most of us. And—you don’t like him.”

  Merewether said nothing. The lines of his face seemed to harden for a moment. Then a formal, constrained smile appeared upon his lips, and turning with cold politeness towards Miss Wimpole he seemed about to make some aloof, non-committal reply. He paused, looking with a sort of intent absent-mindedness at a carved cornelian ring on his finger, and then said quietly and surprisingly:

  “No. I don’t like him.”

  Serafine felt a little embarrassed at this unexpected honesty, and her heart warmed to the doctor. He said no more, and she was rather relieved when Laurence summoned them all to the door. She took John’s arm as they all went leisurely up the dim-lit staircase to Mr. Frew’s studio. The fanlight over the door was open, and through it the fog drifted thinly in and up the staircase. Serafine sniffed.

  “I hate the smell of fog. It’s the worst part of it.”

  “Worse than the murders?” asked Laurence, greatly daring, over his shoulder.

  Serafine laughed. The little man was thawing.

  On the landing Mrs. Wimpole withdrew her hand from Laurence’s arm and stood panting gently with closed eyes.
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  “Oh dear!” stammered Laurence, almost perspiring with compunction. “I’ve rushed you up too fast.”

  “Oh dear no!” murmured Imogen on a fluttering breath. “But if I might... just take a rest... before going in...”

  Her voice died away on a sighing breath in which Laurence thought he could distinguish something about the importance of a good first impression. Watching the lady’s gentle efforts to regain her composure, he felt an abject fool, and the amused grins he received from Christmas and Serafine did nothing to improve his state of mind.

  “If your friend Mr. Frew heard us coming upstairs he’ll be thinking we’re a gang of burglars....”

  “He’s probably now barricading the door,” said John, “and sharpening a scimitar on the sole of his sandal. Come to think of it, old Merewether has rather a burglarious look about him. Gentleman George on the old lay...”

  Serafine looked over the well of the stairs. Sir Marion Steen was treading lightly up, followed at one pace by Dr. Mordby, who had the solicitous enveloping air of a nurse keeping the draught off a baby. Some stairs behind them came George Merewether, alone and detached from the rest of the party, his hands in his trouser-pockets, looking at the stairs with a slight pre-occupied frown. His soft step, his detachment, something still and secret in his look gave an absurd aptitude to John’s frivolous remark.

  Taking a very small glass and a very large powder-puff from her handbag and using them with anxious care, Mrs. Wimpole sighed graciously:

  “You may knock now, Mr. Newtree.”

  The great old wrought-iron knocker with which Mr. Frew had replaced the small bar of brass provided by his landlord fell even to the slightest touch with a heavy, ominous, resounding noise.

  “How feudal!” said Serafine. “The draw-bridge will be lowered at half-past nine precisely.”

  “Like the walls of Jericho,” murmured her aunt, with some obscure association of ideas lost on her hearers. “But artists are always such original people, aren’t they? I mean,” she explained gently as Laurence looked puzzled but humble, “there’s always something peculiar about their front doors.”