The Skeleton in the Clock

For the rush of happiness at seeing Jenny, it seemed to him, had loosed a spell from his wits. He knew now why a certain cloudy reference should have been clear.

'Got what?' asked Jenny, with that eagerness he knew so well.

'Last night a barrister named Stannard mentioned a place in' Berkshire: Fleet House, I think it was. He said there'd been some ugly business, twenty years ago, which was either an accident or a supernatural murder. And that's it, of course!'

'How do you mean?'

'A friend of Sir Henry's, Chief Inspector Masters, has been pestering him to take up the case. Masters wants to re-open it. It seems there's new evidence, anonymous letters or the like.' Martin stopped short. 'What is it? What's wrong?'

He interpreted Jenny's expression, now. It was fear. Again he became conscious of the room's stuffiness, and the weapons glittering round the walls: Jennifer said:

'Richard Fleet my fiance, is the son of the Sir George Fleet who died. Aunt Cicely, who's only an aunt by courtesy, is Lady Fleet My grandmother is their closest friend.'

'Listen, Jenny,' said Martin, after a pause during which his throat felt dry. 'There's only one question I'm going to ask you, but it's got to be answered.'

'Yes?'

'Do you still feel as you did — in the train? Do you?' 'Yes,' replied Jenny and lifted her eyes. 'Yes!'

'Jennifer, dear!' interrupted a calm, authoritative female voice. It cracked their idyll to bits. Jenny started; Martin swung round guiltily. '

And it is now time, in this chronicle, to introduce none other than Sophia, Dowager Countess of Brayle.

She had approached unheard. She was a large, commanding woman, her grey-white hair confined under a rakish fashionable hat, and her body so compressed into a dress of garish design that it almost, but not quite, failed to make her seem fat Her voice, which forty-odd years ago had been called a 'pure contralto' as her nose had been called 'sweetly aquiline,' could often be heard speaking on public platforms.

The Dowager Countess, in fact, occasionally showed habits rakish and even skittish. At these same public meetings, for instance, she had a trick of taking two sweeping steps backwards, while raising her right arm and exclaiming, 'Here's three chee-ah-s.' Sometimes she even did this in private, to the mild-voiced protest of Aunt Cicely.

All her friends would testify to her good qualities: that she was fair, that she was generous, that she even had a sense of humour. She had perhaps every good quality except that of being likeable. But that did not matter. The Dowager Countess meant to get her own way, always got her own way, and accepted this as naturally as she expected a lamp to light at the click of a switch. Whether you liked her, or didn't like her, simply did not matter.

'When you see my composure ruffled,' she would say comfortably, 'then will be the time to criticize.'

This imposing lady, a faint smile on her face and an auction-catalogue in her hand, stood before the two culprits and waited with endless patience for someone to speak.

Jenny, pushing back her yellow hair, blurted it out

'C–Captain Drake,' she said, 'may I present you to my grandmother? Captain Drake, Lady Brayle.'

The latter's nod and glance flickered over Martin as though he had not been there at all.

The auction,' she said to Jenny, 'has begun. Lot 72 should come up in a few minutes. I feel sure, Jennifer, that you will wish to be present? Follow me, please.'

She swung round, her somewhat ample posterior conspicuous in the flowered dress, and moved majestically away. Jenny, on the other side of the long centre table, followed her almost parallel. Martin, with a raging heart, could only follow Jenny. At the far end of the table, however. Lady Brayle wheeled round with her back to the open arch into the main auction-hall. She glanced at the weapons on the table.

'Ah — Jennifer dear,' she continued with a sort of cold archness. 'It occurs to me we must not forget our fiance Now must we?'

Jenny made an incoherent noise.

'Richard, or dear Ricky as we call him..' Lady Brayle paused. 'Captain Drake. Let me see. You were in the Guards?'

'No. The Gloucesters.'

'Oh. The Gloucesters.' Her eyebrow indicated that she had momentarily scanned the army-list and found no such name. 'How interesting. Richard, or dear Ricky as we call him, is one of our new breed of chivalry: our heroic and fearless knights of the air. Don't you think so, Jennifer?'

'Grandmother, he'd pass out if he heard you talk like that!'

But grandmother's contralto was now warming up with platform eloquence.

'You might give him, I think, some small present of arms. This fine old English blade,' exclaimed Lady Brayle, picking up a Turkish scimitar of about 1885, and waving it in the air, 'would surely be suitable. I am informed that the air-force seldom carry swords. But the spirit of it! You agree, Jennifer?'

'Yes, grandmother. But…'

'You agree, Captain Drake?'

Martin swallowed a heavy lump in his throat. This calm and indomitable old lady was trying to get his goat He longed to take one dig at her, just one. But he feared its effect on Jenny. Just how much influence this doubtless- benevolent Gorgon exercised over Jenny, who three years ago had given her age as twenty-two, he could not yet estimate.

'Quite,' he agreed.

'It is no use, Captain Drake,' she smiled at him. 'It really is no use.' 'I beg your pardon?'

'But any criticism you might make of the weapons, of course!' said Lady Brayle, deliberately avoiding the issue and raising her eyebrows. The cold, shrewd grey eyes expressed astonishment 'This cute little dagger, now, with the sheath!' she broke off. 'Perhaps that might appeal to dear Ricky, Jennifer. Or here, better still…'

Martin gritted his teeth. His glance wandered past her into the main auction-hall. For the most part the spectators, either in chairs or standing up, had pressed close to the long horseshoe table below the rostrum. In the cleared space outside and beyond them, approaching slowly and at a lordly pigeon-toed walk, moved a figure which sent Martin Drake's hopes soaring up. 'It's the Old Man,' he breathed.

Chapter 3

The auctioneer's voice was small, thin, and at this distance all but inaudible.

'Lot 55… A fine Queen Anne table, grained mahogany, drawers richly gilt, date circa 1721, originally… '

The figure Martin had seen was a large, stout, barrel-shaped gentleman in a white linen suit His spectacles, usually pulled down on his broad nose, were now in place because he held his head up. On his head was a Panama hat, its brim curiously bent, and in his mouth he clamped an unlighted cigar.

As he advanced, his corporation majestically preceding him, there was on his face such a lordly sneer as even the Dowager Countess could never have imitated. Indeed, a close friend of Sir Henry Merrivale would have noticed something a little odd in his behaviour. The brim of the Panama hat, to an imaginative observer, might have been arranged so as to carry sweeping plumes. As he rolled the cigar round in his mouth to get a better grip, his left hand rested negligently in the air as though on the pommel of an imaginary sword. Aloof, disdainful, he sauntered towards the armour-room.

'Or this, for instance!' cried Lady Brayle.

Martin drew his gaze back. Into the room, unobserved, had slipped another figure: the tiny old man, with the white moustache, whom he had seen hunched over a catalogue in the outer room.

From the table Lady Brayle had fished up a heavy iron shield — round, convex, its outer side scored with dull