likely that Guthrie kept his tower locked up. So I was pleased as well as a mite scared when I found I could get through and up the staircase.’
‘You didn’t meet anybody or hear anything? They’ll ask questions like that.’
‘Nobody and nothing. I tried one or two doors on the way up. They were all locked. So I just went on climbing till I came to the top and walked straight in on this.’
Sybil paused and we both looked about us. A sombre room, full of dark woodwork and simply crammed with books; Guthrie was presumably by way of being a learned man as well as a songster. I began to browse around, partly out of curiosity to see which way his tastes lay, partly because I didn’t want to seem impatient for Sybil’s confidences. At one end of the room the bookshelves ran out in bays; I went and peered into these; then I came back and asked Sybil: ‘You poked about?’
‘I didn’t. I hadn’t time. I wasn’t in the room a minute when I heard footsteps mounting the way I had come. It was Guthrie returning.’
‘A moment not without its embarrassment, Sybil.’
‘I’ll say. I knew I really hadn’t any business to penetrate to this remote study. It was frightfully ill-bred. And I was kind of scared of the old gentleman when it came to the point of facing him with grovelling apologies. I saw that in venturing into his den I’d done a silly thing. And I lost my head.’
Sybil’s head, I reflected, was now happily restored to her shoulders; she was as cool as could be.
‘It was quite mad, but I just cast about for somewhere to hide! There were two possibilities: that door near the staircase door, and that other one over there that is a sort of French window on the parapet walk. The first – the one we now know gives on the little bedroom – proved to be locked; I just had time to make for the other and get through. It wasn’t at all comfortable; I found myself out in the open, on a narrow platform, hundreds of feet in the air and buffeted by a howling hurricane.’
‘Between the Prince of the Air within and his attendant spirits without.’
‘Exactly. I dropped my candle in the snow – it will be there still – and stood clinging to the handle of the door. It was pitch dark and the wind simply caught at my wits and numbed them. Minutes must have passed before I realized that a door meant some sort of security beyond and that I was on something more than the merest ledge. I couldn’t quite get the door shut and I was frightened to risk my balance with a really stout tug. So there I was on one side of the thing and there was Guthrie, moving round lighting a few candles, on the other. I had either to recover my good sense and face him, or stay tucked away. I stayed tucked away.
‘Guthrie went over to the desk there in the middle of the room, sat down and buried his face in his hands. A couple of minutes later – no more – he straightened up and called out something I didn’t catch. The staircase door opened – it was just within my field of vision – and a young man came in, ushered I think by Hardcastle, though I didn’t see him. Guthrie rose, pointed to a chair, and this time I heard him speak quite distinctly. He said: “Mr Lindsay, sit down.”
‘Unfortunately – I suppose it must be said – those were the only words I made out. The wind was howling so that the rest of the interview was simply a dumb-show. They talked earnestly for some time–’
I interrupted. ‘And angrily, Sybil?’
Sybil shook her head. ‘Definitely not. It occurred to me they weren’t good friends – it had the appearance of rather a formal parley – but there wasn’t anything that looked like heat. They might simply have been settling something up.’
‘Like the buying-off business Hardcastle told us of?’
‘I suppose so.’ Sybil had paused for a moment as if to inspect my question. Then she went on. ‘Presently they both stood up and Lindsay shook his head – a curiously gentle, curiously decisive action it seemed to me. They moved towards the door–’
‘They were in view all the time, Sybil? They hadn’t moved, for instance, to the other end of the room?’
‘They were in view all the time. They moved towards the door and there shook hands – formally, I should say, rather than cordially. Lindsay went out and Guthrie turned back. I got a shock when I saw his face. He looked – I don’t know how to put it – tragic and broken. I saw him only for a second. He took a key from his pocket, unlocked the bedroom door and disappeared inside, shutting the door behind him. It seemed about a minute or half a minute later that I heard a faint cry. I waited another minute and then decided to make a dash for the staircase. I was in the middle of the room when you and Hardcastle came in upon me.’
‘And when I asked you about Guthrie you said “He has fallen from the tower.” Forgive me. Sybil, but this is what they will ask. How on earth did you know?’
Sybil Guthrie looked at me in silence for a moment. Then she said: ‘Yes, I see.’ There was another silence. ‘Noel, it was a sort of intuition.’
‘Didn’t you tell me once you weren’t psychic?’
I ought not to have brought that in; I wasn’t a prosecuting barrister. But I felt it extraordinarily important that Sybil should realize certain dangers in her situation. And suddenly she blazed out. ‘I tell you I knew, Noel Gylby! That interview had somehow crushed the man. I saw imminent death in his face. And your rushing in on top of that cry just told me. Guthrie was next to mad anyway and when his plans went wrong he made an end of himself.’
‘He had failed, you mean, to buy Lindsay off, and couldn’t bear the thought of losing his niece?’
‘Something like that. And it should be lurid enough for you.’ We were sitting now perched side by side on Guthrie’s desk. After a time I said: ‘Well, that’s been a useful trial spin, Sybil.’
She turned her head and gave me a quick glance. ‘Just what do you mean by that?’
‘I mean,’ I said gently, ‘that we must have a revised version.’
‘In other words, I’m lying?’
‘Not at all. What you have said may be gospel. But it’s just too awkward to be safe. Your piece of intuition is perfectly possible. But it’s the sort of possibility that looks perfectly awful in a court of law.’
Again Sybil said: ‘Yes, I see.’
‘You are lurking here, Guthrie goes into the bedroom, there is a cry, we rush in, and then your mind takes a great leap in the dark – a leap to the truth, maybe. But you see how strange it could be made to look? Only the fact that you have no real connection with Guthrie is between you and positive suspicion.’
Sybil stood up and faced me. ‘Noel, shall I tell you the truth?’
‘For goodness’ sake do.’
‘Behold the chatelaine of Erchany!’
I jumped up. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I’m Ranald Guthrie’s heir.’
. . .
The row of little dots, Diana, means that you are invited to be staggered. Perhaps you won’t be – if only because I wasn’t myself. That there were wheels within wheels in Sybil Guthrie’s relations with Erchany is something that I’ve had a dim sense of for some time, and that sense has probably got into my earlier narrative. If I was decidedly taken aback it was by the sudden vivid image of Sybil and myself sitting each on a wing of my car in the snow and my seeing the Erchany light and saying so importantly that we would make for
As yet I have got only the outline of what it is all about. The American Guthries – Sybil and her widowed mother – were served some dirty financial turn by Ranald Guthrie; they heard rumours that he was mad and irresponsible; and having an interest in his estate they have been trying in various ways to discover the true state of affairs. Sybil, being in England, decided to discover for herself. She explored the ground some weeks ago and when the snow came she saw her chance. What she didn’t see, poor child, was the awkward scrape into which her irresponsible jaunt was going to lead her. She really is a bit scared now – which only shows her common sense. It is a most extraordinary position.
But if she’s scared she’s also full of fight. Standing before the empty fireplace in Guthrie’s study and looking down on her as she perched once more on the desk, I thought of the motto that I now knew was hers by right.
