Curtain Read online

‘But you don’t know what he is. You can’t know.’ Deliberately, without mincing my language, I repeated to her the story I had heard about Allerton.

  ‘You see,’ I said when I had finished. ‘That’s the kind of foul brute he is.’

  She seemed quite annoyed. Her lips curled upwards scornfully.

  ‘I never thought he was a saint, I can assure you.’

  ‘Doesn’t this make any difference to you? Judith, you can’t be utterly depraved.’

  ‘Call it that if you like.’

  ‘Judith, you haven’t – you aren’t –’

  I could not put my meaning into words. She shook her arm free from my detaining hand.

  ‘Now, listen, Father. I do what I choose. You can’t bully me. And it’s no good ranting. I shall do exactly as I please with my life, and you can’t stop me.’

  In another instant she was out of the room.

  I found my knees trembling.

  I sank down on to a chair. It was worse – much worse than I thought. The child was utterly infatuated. There was no one to whom I could appeal. Her mother, the only person she might have listened to, was dead. It all depended on me.

  I do not think that either before or since I have ever suffered as I suffered then . . .

  IV

  Presently I roused myself. I washed and shaved and changed. I went down to dinner. I behaved, I fancy, in quite a normal manner. Nobody seemed to notice anything amiss.

  Once or twice I saw Judith flash a curious glance at me. She must have been puzzled, I think, by the way I was able to appear quite like my usual self.

  And all the time, underneath, I was growing more and more determined.

  All that I needed was courage – courage and brains. After dinner we went outside, looked up at the sky, commented on the closeness of the atmosphere, prophesied rain – thunder – a storm.

  Out of the tail of my eye I saw Judith disappear round the corner of the house. Presently Allerton strolled in the same direction.

  I finished what I was saying to Boyd Carrington and wandered that way myself.

  Norton, I think, tried to stop me. He took my arm. He tried, I think, to suggest walking up to the rose garden. I took no notice.

  He was still with me as I turned the corner of the house.

  They were there. I saw Judith’s upturned face, saw Allerton’s bent down over it, saw how he took her in his arms and the kiss that followed.

  Then they broke away quickly. I took a step forward. Almost by main force, Norton hauled me back and round the corner. He said: ‘Look here, you can’t –’

  I interrupted him. I said forcefully: ‘I can. And I will.’

  ‘It’s no good, my dear fellow. It’s all very distressing but all it comes to is that there’s nothing you can do.’

  I was silent. He might think that that was so, but I knew better.

  Norton went on: ‘I know how ineffectual and maddened one feels, but the only thing to do is to admit defeat. Accept it, man!’

  I didn’t contradict him. I waited, allowing him to talk. Then I went firmly round the corner of the house again.

  The two of them had disappeared now, but I had a shrewd idea of where they might be. There was a summer-house concealed in a grove of lilac trees not far away.

  I went towards it. I think Norton was still with me, but I’m not sure.

  As I got nearer I heard voices and stopped. It was Allerton’s voice I heard.

  ‘Well, then, my dear girl, that’s settled. Don’t make any more objections. You go up to town tomorrow. I’ll say I’m running over to Ipswich to stay with a pal for a night or two. You wire from London that you can’t get back. And who’s to know of that charming little dinner at my flat? You won’t regret it, I can promise you.’

  I felt Norton tugging at me, and suddenly, meekly, I turned. I almost laughed at the sight of his worried anxious face. I let him drag me back to the house. I pretended to give in because I knew, at that moment, exactly what I was going to do . . .

  I said to him clearly and distinctly: ‘Don’t worry, old chap. It’s all no good – I see that now. You can’t control your children’s lives. I’m through.’

  He was ridiculously relieved.

  Shortly afterwards, I told him I was going to bed early. I’d got a bit of a headache, I said.

  He had no suspicions at all of what I was going to do.

  V

  I paused for a moment in the corridor. It was quite quiet. There was no one about. The beds had been all turned down ready for the night. Norton, who had a room on this side, I had left downstairs. Elizabeth Cole was playing bridge. Curtiss, I knew, would be downstairs having his supper. I had the place to myself.

  I flatter myself that I have not worked with Poirot for so many years in vain. I knew just what precautions to take.

  Allerton was not going to meet Judith in London tomorrow.

  Allerton was not going anywhere tomorrow . . . The whole thing was really so ridiculously simple.

  I went to my own room and picked up my bottle of aspirins. Then I went into Allerton’s room and into the bathroom. The tablets of Slumberyl were in the cupboard. Eight, I considered, ought to do the trick. One or two was the stated dose. Eight, therefore, ought to be ample. Allerton himself had said the toxic dose was not high. I read the label. ‘It is dangerous to exceed the prescribed dose.’

  I smiled to myself.

  I wrapped a silk handkerchief round my hand and unscrewed the bottle carefully. There must be no fingerprints on it.

  I emptied out the tablets. Yes, they were almost exactly the same size as the aspirins. I put eight aspirins in the bottle, then filled up with the Slumberyls, leaving out eight of them. The bottle now looked exactly as it had before. Allerton would notice no difference.

  I went back to my room. I had a bottle of whisky there – most of us had at Styles. I got out two glasses and a syphon. I’d never known Allerton refuse a drink yet. When he came up I’d ask him in for a nightcap.

  I tried the tablets in a little of the spirit. They dissolved easily enough. I tasted the mixture gingerly. A shade bitter perhaps but hardly noticeable. I had my plan. I should be just pouring myself out a drink when Allerton came up. I would hand that to him and pour myself out another. All quite easy and natural.

  He could have no idea of my feelings – unless of course Judith had told him. I considered this for a moment, but decided that I was quite safe here. Judith never told anyone anything.

  He would probably believe me to be quite unsuspicious of their plan.

  I had nothing to do but to wait. It would be a long time, probably an hour or two, before Allerton came up to bed. He was always a late bird.

  I sat there quietly waiting.

  A sudden knock on the door made me start. It was only Curtiss, however. Poirot was asking for me.

  I came to myself with a shock. Poirot! I had never once thought of him all evening. He must have wondered what had become of me. It worried me a little. First of all because I was ashamed of never having been near him, and secondly I did not want him to suspect that anything out of the way had happened.

  I followed Curtiss across the passage.

  ‘Eh bien!’ exclaimed Poirot. ‘So you desert me, hein?’

  I forced a yawn and an apologetic smile. ‘Awfully sorry, old boy,’ I said. ‘But to tell the truth I’ve got such a blinding headache I can hardly see out of my eyes. It’s the thunder in the air, I suppose. I really have been feeling quite muzzy with it – in fact, so much so I entirely forgot I hadn’t been in to say good night to you.’

  As I had hoped, Poirot was immediately solicitous. He offered remedies. He fussed. He accused me of having sat about in the open air in a draught. (On the hottest day of the summer!) I refused aspirin on the grounds that I had already taken some, but I was not able to avoid being given a cup of sweet and wholly disgusting chocolate!

  ‘It nourishes the nerves, you comprehend,’ Poirot explained.

  I drank it to
avoid argument and then, with Poirot’s anxious and affectionate exclamations still ringing in my ears, I bade him good night.

  I returned to my own room, and shut the door ostentatiously. Later, I opened it a crack with the utmost caution. I could not fail now to hear Allerton when he came. But it would be some time yet.

  I sat there waiting. I thought of my dead wife. Once, under my breath, I murmured: ‘You understand, darling, I’m going to save her.’

  She had left Judith in my care, I was not going to fail her.

  In the quiet and the stillness I suddenly felt that Cinders was very near to me.

  I felt almost as though she were in the room. And still I sat on grimly, waiting.

  Chapter 13

  I

  There is something about writing down an anti-climax in cold blood that is somewhat shattering to one’s self-esteem.

  For the truth of the matter is, you see, that I sat there waiting for Allerton and that I fell asleep!

  Not so surprising really, I suppose. I had slept very badly the night before. I had been out in the air the whole day. I was worn out with worry and the strain of nerving myself for doing what I had decided to do. On top of all that was the heavy thundery weather. Possibly even the fierce effort of concentration I was making helped.

  Anyway, it happened. I fell asleep there in my chair, and when I woke birds were twittering outside, the sun was up and there was I, cramped and uncomfortable, slipped down in my chair in my evening dress, with a foul taste in the mouth and a splitting head.

  I was bewildered, incredulous, disgusted, and finally immeasurably and overwhelmingly relieved.

  Who was it who wrote, ‘The darkest day, lived till tomorrow, will have passed away’? And how true it is. I saw now, clearly and sanely, how overwrought and wrong-headed I had been. Melodramatic, lost to all sense of proportion. I had actually made up my mind to kill another human being.

  At this moment my eyes fell on the glass of whisky in front of me. With a shudder I got up, drew the curtains and poured it out of the window. I must have been mad last night!

  I shaved, had a bath and dressed. Then, feeling very much better, I went across to Poirot. He always woke very early, I knew. I sat down and made a clean breast of the whole thing to him.

  I may say it was a great relief.

  He shook his head gently at me. ‘Ah, but what follies it is you contemplate. I am glad you came to confess your sins to me. But why, my dear friend, did you not come to me last night and tell me what was in your mind?’

  I said shame-facedly: ‘I was afraid, I suppose, that you would have tried to stop me.’

  ‘Assuredly I would have stopped you. Ah that, certainly. Do you think I want to see you hanged by the neck, all on account of a very unpleasant scoundrel called Major Allerton?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have been caught,’ I said. ‘I’d taken every precaution.’

  ‘That is what all murderers think. You had the true mentality! But let me tell you, mon ami, you were not as clever as you thought yourself.’

  ‘I took every precaution. I wiped my fingerprints off the bottle.’

  ‘Exactly. You also wiped Allerton’s fingerprints off. And when he is found dead, what happens? They perform the autopsy and it is established that he died of an overdose of Slumberyl. Did he take it by accident or intention? Tiens, his fingerprints are not on the bottle. But why not? Whether accident or suicide he would have no reason to wipe them off. And then they analyse the remaining tablets and find nearly half of them have been replaced by aspirin.’

  ‘Well, practically everyone has aspirin tablets,’ I murmured weakly.

  ‘Yes, but it is not everyone who has a daughter whom Allerton is pursuing with dishonourable intentions – to use an old-fashioned dramatic phrase. And you have had a quarrel with your daughter on the subject the day before. Two people, Boyd Carrington and Norton, can swear to your violent feeling against the man. No, Hastings, it would not have looked too good. Attention would immediately have been focused upon you, and by that time you would probably have been in such a state of fear – or even remorse – that some good solid inspector of police would have made up his mind quite definitely that you were the guilty party. It is quite possible, even, that someone may have seen you tampering with the tablets.’

  ‘They couldn’t. There was no one about.’

  ‘There is a balcony outside the window. Somebody might have been there, peeping in. Or, who knows, someone might have been looking through the keyhole.’

  ‘You’ve got keyholes on the brain, Poirot. People don’t really spend their time looking through keyholes as much as you seem to think.’

  Poirot half closed his eyes and remarked that I had always had too trusting a nature.

  ‘And let me tell you, very funny things happen with keys in this house. Me, I like to feel that my door is locked on the inside, even if the good Curtiss is in the adjoining room. Soon after I am here, my key disappears – but entirely! I have to have another one made.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ I said with a deep breath of relief, my mind still laden with my own troubles, ‘it didn’t come off. It’s awful to think one can get worked up like that.’ I lowered my voice. ‘Poirot, you don’t think that because – because of that murder long ago there’s a sort of infection in the air?’

  ‘A virus of murder, you mean? Well, it is an interesting suggestion.’

  ‘Houses do have an atmosphere,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘This house has a bad history.’

  Poirot nodded. ‘Yes. There have been people here – several of them – who desired deeply that someone else should die. That is true enough.’

  ‘I believe it gets hold of one in some way. But now, Poirot, tell me, what am I to do about all this – Judith and Allerton, I mean. It’s got to be stopped somehow. What do you think I’d better do?’

  ‘Do nothing,’ said Poirot with emphasis.

  ‘Oh, but –’

  ‘Believe me, you will do least harm by not interfering.’

  ‘If I were to tackle Allerton –’

  ‘What can you say or do? Judith is twenty-one and her own mistress.’

  ‘But I feel I ought to be able –’

  Poirot interrupted me. ‘No, Hastings. Do not imagine that you are clever enough, forceful enough, or even cunning enough to impose your personality on either of those two people. Allerton is accustomed to dealing with angry and impotent fathers and probably enjoys it as a good joke. Judith is not the sort of creature who can be browbeaten. I would advise you – if I advised you at all – to do something very different. I would trust her if I were you.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘Judith,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘is made of very fine stuff. I admire her very much.’

  I said, my voice unsteady: ‘I admire her, too. But I’m afraid for her.’

  Poirot nodded his head with sudden energy. ‘I, too, am afraid for her,’ he said. ‘But not in the way you are. I am terribly afraid. And I am powerless – or nearly so. And the days go by. There is danger, Hastings, and it is very close.’

  II

  I knew as well as Poirot that the danger was very close. I had more reason to know it than he had, because of what I had actually overheard the previous night.

  Nevertheless I pondered on that phrase of Poirot’s as I went down to breakfast. ‘I would trust her if I were you.’

  It had come unexpectedly, but it had given me an odd sense of comfort. And almost immediately, the truth of it was justified. For Judith had obviously changed her mind about going up to London that day.

  Instead she went off with Franklin to the lab as usual directly after breakfast, and it was clear that they were to have an arduous and busy day there.

  A feeling of intense thanksgiving rushed over me. How mad, how despairing I had been last night. I had assumed – assumed quite certainly – that Judith had yielded to Allerton’s specious proposals. But it was true, I reflected now, that I had never heard her actually assent.
No, she was too fine, too essentially good and true, to give in. She had refused the rendezvous.

  Allerton had breakfasted early, I found, and gone off to Ipswich. He, then, had kept to the plan and must assume that Judith was going up to London as arranged.

  ‘Well,’ I thought grimly, ‘he will get a disappointment.’

  Boyd Carrington came along and remarked rather grumpily that I looked very cheerful this morning.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some good news.’

  He said that it was more than he had. He’d had a tiresome telephone call from the architect, some building difficulty – a local surveyor cutting up rough. Also worrying letters. And he was afraid he’d let Mrs Franklin overdo herself the day before.

  Mrs Franklin was certainly making up for her recent bout of good health and spirits. She was, so I gathered from Nurse Craven, making herself quite impossible.

  Nurse Craven had had to give up her day off which had been promised her to go and meet some friends,

  and she was decidedly sour about it. Since early morning Mrs Franklin had been calling for sal volatile, hot-water bottles, various patent food and drinks, and was unwilling to let Nurse leave the room. She had neuralgia, a pain round the heart, cramps in her feet and legs, cold shivers and I don’t know what else.

  I may say here and now that neither I, nor anyone else, was inclined to be really alarmed. We all put it down as part of Mrs Franklin’s hypochondriacal tendencies.

  This was true of Nurse Craven and Dr Franklin as well.

  The latter was fetched from the laboratory; he listened to his wife’s complaints, asked her if she would like the local doctor called in (violently negatived by Mrs Franklin); he then mixed her a sedative, soothed her as best he could and went off back to work again.

  Nurse Craven said to me: ‘He knows, of course, she’s just playing up.’

  ‘You don’t really think there’s anything much the matter?’

  ‘Her temperature is normal, and her pulse is perfectly good. Just fuss, if you ask me.’

  She was annoyed and spoke out more imprudently than usual.

  ‘She likes to interfere with anyone else enjoying themselves. She’d like her husband all worked up, and me running round after her, and even Sir William has got to be made to feel like a brute because he “overtired her yesterday”. She’s one of that kind.’