VII
11:01 p.m.—Banked Fires
The corridor was deserted.
Lieutenant Valcour walked along it to the top of the stair well and looked down into the entrance hall. He could see the broad athletic back of Officer O’Brian on guard at the door. O’Brian’s snub nose was pressed against the plate glass, and his eyes, one presumed, were staring out through the door’s bronze grille upon the street.
As Lieutenant Valcour went down he wondered at the complete stillness of the house. There was no sound of any nature at all. There was a waiting quality about the stillness: a definite waiting for something that would shatter the hush into bedlam.
“What are you pressing your nose against the glass for, O’Brian?” he said.
The young policeman turned and grinned at him broadly.
“Sure, it’s them boys from the papers, sir,” he said. “They’re all stirred up over what the medical examiner has just told them.”
Lieutenant Valcour groaned faintly. “When was this, O’Brian?”
“Not two whisks of a lamb’s tail ago, sir—out there in the vestibule.”
“Did the medical examiner go out into the vestibule?”
“He did that, Lieutenant, and the last mother’s son of them has just beaten it off down the street like a jumping jack rabbit. They were crazy after photographs, but he drew the line at that now.”
“Really?” Lieutenant Valcour was politely astounded.
“Sure and he did—with the exception of a flash or two he let them take of himself.”
“And were you the little birdie, O’Brian?”
“Was I the which, Lieutenant?”
“Did you say ‘peet-tweet’ over his left shoulder as the flashlights went off?”
“Ah, sure now, sir, and I did have the door open a wee bit. I was just explaining to the boys that they couldn’t come in without your permission nohow, and it was then that the medical examiner came along and, hearing the talking, went outside to pacify them.”
“A modern martyr throwing himself to the lions. Except for the tea party, O’Brian, has anything happened down here?”
“Not a thing, sir.”
“Any of the servants been drifting around?”
“Only one old dame in black, and seven foot tall if she’s one inch. She came halfway down the stairs, took one dirty look at me, and then stalked back up as stiff as a poker. Her bonnet was on her head.”
“You don’t know who she was, I suppose?”
“That and I don’t, sir. She looked like she might be a housekeeper.”
“She probably was. By the way, O’Brian, just what was it the medical examiner told the boys?”
“Lieutenant, I could make neither the head nor the tail out of it. I’d been telling them myself that the boss upstairs was dead and that foul play was suspected, and they were hot after the medical examiner for a further word, and I’m damned if he didn’t give it to them.”
“What was the word, O’Brian?”
“Indeed and it sounded like crinoline, sir—the stuff the missus do be talking about in old dresses.”
“Was that all he said?”
“It was enough, sir. ‘Crinoline,’ said he, and looked very wise at that. Then he added, ‘For the present, boys, no more,’ and off they scampered like the devil in person was after them.”
“All right, O’Brian. Just stick where you are.”
Lieutenant Valcour wandered around the entrance hall but encountered, beyond his own and the medical examiner’s, no hat. He knew that Dr. Worth’s was still upstairs where the doctor had left it in Endicott’s bedroom. He found the cupboard Mrs. Endicott had referred to. There was no hat. The subject was becoming a fixed idea. It was growing increasingly believable that the attacker had taken the hat and worn it out of the house. But why should the attacker leave the house? And what was the matter with the attacker’s own hat? Time, if not Endicott himself, would have to tell.
From a reception room opening off the entrance hall he caught the murmur of Dr. Worth’s and the medical examiner’s voices in consultation. He passed the door indifferently and went upstairs.
… an old dame in black, seven foot tall if she was an inch. Her bonnet was on her head.
… and her bonnet, Lieutenant Valcour repeated softly to himself, was on her head.
He continued on up a second flight of stairs to the third floor. A door toward the end of the hall was open, and light flooded out through the doorway. He walked to it and looked in.
A tall, thin woman sat on a chair before a grate in which some coals burned bleakly. She was unbelievably gaunt—her silhouette a pencil, rigidly supporting an austere face beneath a smooth inverted cup of steel gray hair. Black taffeta sheathed her, tightly pressing against flat narrow planes, and smoothly surfacing two pipelike arms that ended in the tapering, sensitive hands of an emotional ascetic.
Lieutenant Valcour rapped on the door jamb.
The woman did not start. Her head alone turned and faced him, and her eyes were a contradiction of nature—black planets glowing coldly in a sky of white.
“Pardon me, I am Lieutenant Valcour of the police. Are you, by any chance, the housekeeper?”
Her voice was of New England—low almost to huskiness, a trifle harsh, and completely stripped of all nuances.
“Yes, Lieutenant. I am Mrs. Siddons.”
“May I come in? Thank you—please don’t get up. I’ll only stay a minute or two, if you don’t mind.”
He took a chair and placed it before the fireplace beside her own. He sat down and did nothing beyond observing obliquely for a moment the curiously artificial placidity of Mrs. Siddons’s clasped hands.
“There is no use in questioning me, Lieutenant, because I have nothing to say.”
Her tone was the chill clear winds that sweep the rigorous mountains of Vermont.
Lieutenant Valcour warmed his hands before the lazy coals and smiled amiably. “And I,” he said, “have absolutely nothing to ask.”
“That is a lie.”
There was nothing abusive in the remark. It was simply a statement of fact, coldly, dispassionately pronounced by the remarkable pencil dressed in black who spired beside him. Lieutenant Valcour was shocked into a nervous laugh. He discarded his mask of indifference and stared at
