The “Curtain”
GIVEN additional strength by the thought of the imminent return of Heinrich, he carried the body along the passage, stopped before one of the doors, opened it, and took the body into the dark interior of the room. He could hear the butler’s tread in the small hall, and he heard the man’s footsteps in the passage as without sound he closed the door.
The footsteps passed. In darkness Bony crouched over the dead man and relieved the body of a small-calibre automatic and a bulky pocket wallet, which he stowed inside his shirt. He found a bed, and under the bed he pushed the body.
The lowest notes of the organ reached him even there. They were like the slow heart-beats of a dying man. He thought of the organist, of the persons listening to the organ, of the two girls who had been flogged into domestic service, of two milk-white backs bloodied and scarred for life. He thought of Benson, cold, hard, and rigid, and of his sister, stiff and merciless.
The butler passed along the passage to the small hall, and Bony opened the bedroom door and peered round the frame to see the man leave the house. Slipping into the passage and closing the door, he raced to the hall, and from round the frame of the outer door watched the butler cross and enter the observatory. Twenty seconds later he was unlocking the padlock securing the bolt of the prison door.
The door was opened before he could push it inward, and the girls emerged to stand close to him, to touch him as though belief was impossible that he was their rescuer.
“It’s a fine night for a stroll, among other things,” he told them. “Are you ready?”
He commanded them not to speak and to walk as softly as possible on the gravel. The organist was playing something with an extraordinary throb in it, and as they moved away from the prison a woman’s voice broke into song. Bony’s pulses had been stirred, but this song stirred them in another way. She sang superbly, and stone walls could not distort her voice, rich and full, and giving the promise of all delights.
Bony expelled his breath and, taking the girls by the arm, he drew them away, passing the house, reaching the open gateway in the encircling hedge, and so to the road. And in his heart a pang of regret that he could not stay and listen to the singer.
He had succeeded in the most difficult part of the operation, which, however, was uncompleted. There was the key in his pocket, and it ought to be on its nail inside the doorway. Its position had been prominent, and Heinrich might well miss it despite the fact that familiar objects, or absence of them, are unregistered by a mind occupied with an important event.
The thought switched his mind to another track. Why go back to the homestead? Once again he had finalised a case he had consented to accept. He had been asked to establish the fate of two missing girls, and now he had done just that to his own satisfaction. It remained for him to get them clear of Baden Park and into the hands of people who knew them, or the police, when their story could be told to the world’s satisfaction. He had laboured and suffered hardship, both physical and mental, and the cleaning of this nest of murderers and abductors would rightly be the task for Mulligan.
Was it not his duty to guard these two girls until the police arrived? Well? Perhaps; perhaps not. Duty wrestled with vanity, and vanity gained the fall.
“Can you see the road?” he asked, and there was no longer necessity to whisper.
“Oh yes,” replied the girl on his right. “It’s not so dark after all.”
“The clothes you are wearing, are they warm enough, do you think, if you have to wait about for some time?”
“Yes. Besides, the night isn’t cold.”
“Good! Do you think you could walk for something more than a mile to the gate in the boundary fence?”
The left-hand girl cried emotionally:
“Walk! Oh, I could walk for miles and miles and days and days. Don’t you see, we are free, free, free. Oh, thank you for getting us away from those horrible people.” She altered her steps to walk in unison, and herslippered feet sang with happiness. The right-hand girl pressed his arm against herself, and the three of them swung along the road.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said, “because I shall not be able to go with you all the way. It’s now nearly two o’clock. In another four hours it will be light, and I am hoping that before day breaks the police will arrive in force, for there will be plenty of them. If you follow this road for a mile you will come to a large gate in a tall wire fence. Now this side of the gate, about twenty feet, you will see across the road a narrow black ribbon. That’s made of metal, and when you both stand on it the gate will open. When the gate is wide open you must run through the gateway, and then the gate will close again. Do both of you understand that?”
“Yes. We stand on the metal ribbon across the road and the gate opens long enough for us to go through.”
“That’s it. Now a little time after I leave you to go back to the homestead, I want you both to sing, and keep on singing until you reach the gate. Not loudly, but softly. Unfortunately you will not see the gate in the darkness until you are actually against it, but it is essential that as you approach the gate you will be singing, softly singing.”
“All right! But why?”
“Because a friend of mine will, most likely, be waiting outside the gate, and if he doesn’t know you are you he might throw a stone or something. Glen Shannon is, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, a trifle impulsive.”
“I’m going to love that boy,” announced the right-side girl.
“I’ve loved him a long time,” announced the left-side girl. “You remember, Beryl, that I loved him first.”
“I’ll never forget it. You’ve done nothing else but din him into my ears for years and years.” She braked Bony to a halt. “But why are you going back? If the police are coming, why go back there? They might shoot you. They would, I think.”
“I won’t give them the chance to shoot me,” Bony boasted. “And besides, I want to hear that woman singing again.”
“That was Miss Cora Benson, the lady who stands by and counts the lashes,” asserted Mavis Sanky, bitterness making her attractive voice hard. “She was singing that German song, ‘Lilli Marlene’. Shecan sing, I’ll admit. Have you a pistol?”
“I have two.”
“Then let me have one, and I’ll go back with you and help somehow.”
“You might shoot someone.”
“I want to shoot that Heinrich.”
Bony gently urged them into walking towards the gate and, he greatly hoped, Glen Shannon.
“Leave Heinrich to me,” he said soothingly. “Don’t think back. Don’t permit your experiences here at Baden Park to weigh upon you. Ahead is the gateway to freedom and life and love. Go on from the gateway and leave the nightmare behind.”
He felt Beryl Carson shudder. She was the slighter of the two and, as he knew from observation, mentally the tougher.
“Have you ever been flogged?” she asked, and he answered:
“No. But I have discovered that I am capable of flogging. Now, no more of this. The gate is a mile distant, and I must leave you. If Glen Shannon is not there, go on beyond the gate and up the road for some distance and then rest among the boulders. Wait there till daylight, for in the dark you cannot tell friend from enemy. I shall be wondering about you. Tell Glen Shannon he is not to enter Baden Park until the police arrive.”
“We’ll tell him, and don’t you worry,” one said, and the other asked:
“What’s your name?”
“I am Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, and all my friends call me Bony. I am hoping you will consent to be my friends.”
“I wish it was light,” said Beryl. “I’d like to look at you.”
“I fear you would be disappointed. Now, we part here. Don’t forget to sing softly. Aurevoir!”
He was shocked when first one and then the other kissed him with a spontaneity indicative of gratitude and relief from oppression which words could not possibly express. He stood motionless on the road, listening. The homestead revealed no lights, no sound. He could no longer see the two girls, but he could hear them singing in unison, softly, beautifully. They were singing “Tipperary”.
Twenty minutes later he was pressing his back against the observatory.
He could neither see nor feel any alteration in the picture. The recital, concert, or service, or whatever was going on, was still in progress. The door of the observatory was still ajar. The organist was playing something languorous and soothing to the nerves, Bony’s nerves, and he was feeling the benefit of respite following the second act of a tense melodrama. He had “sneaked” a cigarette made with the ends of those last cigarettes built with ends, and he would have experienced both pleasure and comfort in “sneaking” a square meal and a couple of drinks. He might have tried for one or the other and been lucky with both, did he know the position of the butler. Had he known this he would have made the attempt to return the key to its nail.
He estimated that he had been back at least ten minutes and, having remained inactive for a further ten minutes, he was prepared to gamble that Heinrich was within and not at the house for refreshments.
He took the chance and looked inside. He could see one of the women and several of the men seated inprie-dieu chairs, their backs towards him, and thus preventing identification. The chairs were a part of a line or row, the occupants facing towards a curtain of heavy swathes of alternating black and purple satin, concealing at least one-third of the interior of the building.
The organ was beyond the narrow range of his vision. The organist was playing softly a Johann Strauss waltz, and the people occupying the chairs were conversing.
The “curtain” inflamed Bony’s curiosity. Itself, it was a thing of great beauty, tossing outward the light in shimmering waves of barred colour. Almost certainly beyond it was a stage, and no artifice ever invented to lure a famished mouse into a trap was more magnetic than was that curtain. Questions were like hammers. What was upon the stage? What brought these people here? Why was not the organ at one side or other of the stage? Why was it placed somewhat just inside the door?
The butler moved into Bony’s range. He was gathering glasses. He had the hands of a boxer, the face of a burglar, the head of a typical Prussian.
Bony slipped away to cover as Heinrich came towards the door with his loaded tray.