The Last Seance Read online

  Then her heart gave a sickening thump. The door was pushed open and her husband came into the hall.

  ‘Do go away, Gerald,’ she said pettishly. ‘I hate anyone listening when I’m telephoning.’

  He merely laughed and threw himself into a chair.

  ‘Sure it really is the butcher you’re telephoning to?’ he quizzed.

  Alix was in despair. Her plan had failed. In a minute Dick Windyford would come to the phone. Should she risk all and cry out an appeal for help?

  And then, as she nervously depressed and released the little key in the receiver she was holding, which permits the voice to be heard or not heard at the other end, another plan flashed into her head.

  ‘It will be difficult,’ she thought to herself. ‘It means keeping my head, and thinking of the right words, and not faltering for a moment, but I believe I could do it. I must do it.’

  And at that minute she heard Dick Windyford’s voice at the other end of the phone.

  Alix drew a deep breath. Then she depressed the key firmly and spoke.

  ‘Mrs Martin speaking—from Philomel Cottage. Please come (she released the key) tomorrow morning with six nice veal cutlets (she depressed the key again). It’s very important (she released the key). Thank you so much, Mr Hexworthy: you won’t mind my ringing you up so late. I hope, but those veal cutlets are really a matter of (she depressed the key again) life or death (she released it). Very well—tomorrow morning (she depressed it) as soon as possible.’

  She replaced the receiver on the hook and turned to face her husband, breathing hard.

  ‘So that’s how you talk to your butcher, is it?’ said Gerald.

  ‘It’s the feminine touch,’ said Alix lightly.

  She was simmering with excitement. He had suspected nothing. Dick, even if he didn’t understand, would come.

  She passed into the sitting-room and switched on the electric light. Gerald followed her.

  ‘You seem very full of spirits now?’ he said, watching her curiously.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alix. ‘My headache’s gone.’

  She sat down in her usual seat and smiled at her husband as he sank into his own chair opposite her. She was saved. It was only five and twenty past eight. Long before nine o’clock Dick would have arrived.

  ‘I didn’t think much of that coffee you gave me,’ complained Gerald. ‘It tasted very bitter.’

  ‘It’s a new kind I was trying. We won’t have it again if you don’t like it, dear.’

  Alix took up a piece of needlework and began to stitch. Gerald read a few pages of his book. Then he glanced up at the clock and tossed the book away.

  ‘Half-past eight. Time to go down to the cellar and start work.’

  The sewing slipped from Alix’s fingers.

  ‘Oh, not yet. Let us wait until nine o’clock.’

  ‘No, my girl—half-past eight. That’s the time I fixed. You’ll be able to get to bed all the earlier.’

  ‘But I’d rather wait until nine.’

  ‘You know when I fix a time I always stick to it. Come along, Alix. I’m not going to wait a minute longer.’

  Alix looked up at him, and in spite of herself she felt a wave of terror slide over her. The mask had been lifted. Gerald’s hands were twitching, his eyes were shining with excitement, he was continually passing his tongue over his dry lips. He no longer cared to conceal his excitement.

  Alix thought, ‘It’s true—he can’t wait—he’s like a madman.’

  He strode over to her, and jerked her on to her feet with a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Come on, my girl—or I’ll carry you there.’

  His tone was gay, but there was an undisguised ferocity behind it that appalled her. With a supreme effort she jerked herself free and clung cowering against the wall. She was powerless. She couldn’t get away—she couldn’t do anything—and he was coming towards her.

  ‘Now, Alix—’

  ‘No—no.’

  She screamed, her hands held out impotently to ward him off.

  ‘Gerald—stop—I’ve got something to tell you, something to confess—’

  He did stop.

  ‘To confess?’ he said curiously.

  ‘Yes, to confess.’ She had used the words at random, but she went on desperately, seeking to hold his arrested attention.

  A look of contempt swept over his face.

  ‘A former lover, I suppose,’ he sneered.

  ‘No,’ said Alix. ‘Something else. You’d call it, I expect—yes, you’d call it a crime.’

  And at once she saw that she had struck the right note. Again his attention was arrested, held. Seeing that, her nerve came back to her. She felt mistress of the situation once more.

  ‘You had better sit down again,’ she said quietly.

  She herself crossed the room to her old chair and sat down. She even stooped and picked up her needlework. But behind her calmness she was thinking and inventing feverishly: for the story she invented must hold his interest until help arrived.

  ‘I told you,’ she said slowly, ‘that I had been a shorthand typist for fifteen years. That was not entirely true. There were two intervals. The first occurred when I was twenty-two. I came across a man, an elderly man with a little property. He fell in love with me and asked me to marry him. I accepted. We were married.’ She paused. ‘I induced him to insure his life in my favour.’

  She saw a sudden keen interest spring up in her husband’s face, and went on with renewed assurance:

  ‘During the war I worked for a time in a hospital dispensary. There I had the handling of all kinds of rare drugs and poisons.’

  She paused reflectively. He was keenly interested now, not a doubt of it. The murderer is bound to have an interest in murder. She had gambled on that, and succeeded. She stole a glance at the clock. It was five and twenty to nine.

  ‘There is one poison—it is a little white powder. A pinch of it means death. You know something about poisons perhaps?’

  She put the question in some trepidation. If he did, she would have to be careful.

  ‘No,’ said Gerald: ‘I know very little about them.’

  She drew a breath of relief.

  ‘You have heard of hyoscine, of course? This is a drug that acts much the same way, but is absolutely untraceable. Any doctor would give a certificate of heart failure. I stole a small quantity of this drug and kept it by me.’

  She paused, marshalling her forces.

  ‘Go on,’ said Gerald.

  ‘No. I’m afraid. I can’t tell you. Another time.’

  ‘Now,’ he said impatiently. ‘I want to hear.’

  ‘We had been married a month. I was very good to my elderly husband, very kind and devoted. He spoke in praise of me to all the neighbours. Everyone knew what a devoted wife I was. I always made his coffee myself every evening. One evening, when we were alone together, I put a pinch of the deadly alkaloid in his cup—’

  Alix paused, and carefully re-threaded her needle. She, who had never acted in her life, rivalled the greatest actress in the world at this moment. She was actually living the part of the cold-blooded poisoner.

  ‘It was very peaceful. I sat watching him. Once he gasped a little and asked for air. I opened the window. Then he said he could not move from his chair. Presently he died.’

  She stopped, smiling. It was a quarter to nine. Surely they would come soon.

  ‘How much,’ said Gerald, ‘was the insurance money?’

  ‘About two thousand pounds. I speculated with it, and lost it. I went back to my office work. But I never meant to remain there long. Then I met another man. I had stuck to my maiden name at the office. He didn’t know I had been married before. He was a younger man, rather good-looking, and quite well-off. We were married quietly in Sussex. He didn’t want to insure his life, but of course he made a will in my favour. He liked me to make his coffee myself just as my first husband had done.’

  Alix smiled reflectively, and added simply, ‘I m
ake very good coffee.’

  Then she went on:

  ‘I had several friends in the village where we were living. They were very sorry for me, with my husband dying suddenly of heart failure one evening after dinner. I didn’t quite like the doctor. I don’t think he suspected me, but he was certainly very surprised at my husband’s sudden death. I don’t quite know why I drifted back to the office again. Habit, I suppose. My second husband left about four thousand pounds. I didn’t speculate with it this time; I invested it. Then, you see—’

  But she was interrupted. Gerald Martin, his face suffused with blood, half-choking, was pointing a shaking forefinger at her.

  ‘The coffee—my God! the coffee!’

  She stared at him.

  ‘I understand now why it was bitter. You devil! You’ve been up to your tricks again.’

  His hands gripped the arms of his chair. He was ready to spring upon her.

  ‘You’ve poisoned me.’

  Alix had retreated from him to the fireplace. Now, terrified, she opened her lips to deny—and then paused. In another minute he would spring upon her. She summoned all her strength. Her eyes held his steamy, compellingly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I poisoned you. Already the poison is working. At this minute you can’t move from your chair—you can’t move—’

  If she could keep him there—even a few minutes . . .

  Ah! what was that? Footsteps on the road. The creak of the gate. Then footsteps on the path outside. The outer door opening.

  ‘You can’t move,’ she said again.

  Then she slipped past him and fled headlong from the room to fall fainting into Dick Windyford’s arms.

  ‘My God! Alix,’ he cried.

  Then he turned to the man with him, a tall stalwart figure in policeman’s uniform.

  ‘Go and see what’s been happening in that room.’

  He laid Alix carefully down on a couch and bent over her.

  ‘My little girl,’ he murmured. ‘My poor little girl. What have they been doing to you?’

  Her eyelids fluttered and her lips just murmured his name.

  Dick was aroused by the policeman’s touching him on the arm.

  ‘There’s nothing in that room, sir, but a man sitting in a chair. Looks as though he’d had some kind of bad fright, and—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, sir, he’s—dead.’

  They were startled by hearing Alix’s voice. She spoke as though in some kind of dream, her eyes still closed.

  ‘And presently,’ she said, almost as though she were quoting from something, ‘he died—’

  The Lamp

  It was undoubtedly an old house. The whole square was old, with that disapproving dignified old age often met with in a cathedral town. But No. 19 gave the impression of an elder among elders; it had a veritable patriarchal solemnity; it towered greyest of the grey, haughtiest of the haughty, chillest of the chill. Austere, forbidding, and stamped with that particular desolation attaching to all houses that have been long untenanted, it reigned above the other dwellings.

  In any other town it would have been freely labelled ‘haunted’, but Weyminster was averse from ghosts and considered them hardly respectable except at the appanage of a ‘county family’. So No. 19 was never alluded to as a haunted house; but nevertheless it remained, year after year, ‘To be Let or Sold.’

  Mrs Lancaster looked at the house with approval as she drove up with the talkative house agent, who was in an unusually hilarious mood at the idea of getting No. 19 off his books. He inserted the key in the door without ceasing his appreciative comments.

  ‘How long has the house been empty?’ inquired Mrs Lancaster, cutting short his flow of language rather brusquely.

  Mr Raddish (of Raddish and Foplow) became slightly confused.

  ‘Er—er—some time,’ he remarked blandly.

  ‘So I should think,’ said Mrs Lancaster drily.

  The dimly lighted hall was chill with a sinister chill. A more imaginative woman might have shivered, but this woman happened to be eminently practical. She was tall with much dark brown hair just tinged with grey and rather cold blue eyes.

  She went over the house from attic to cellar, asking a pertinent question from time to time. The inspection over, she came back into one of the front rooms looking out on the square and faced the agent with a resolute mien.

  ‘What is the matter with the house?’

  Mr Raddish was taken by surprise.

  ‘Of course, an unfurnished house is always a little gloomy,’ he parried feebly.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Lancaster. ‘The rent is ridiculously low for such a house—purely nominal. There must be some reason for it. I suppose the house is haunted?’

  Mr Raddish gave a nervous little start but said nothing.

  Mrs Lancaster eyed him keenly. After a few moments she spoke again.

  ‘Of course that is all nonsense, I don’t believe in ghosts or anything of that sort, and personally it is no deterrent to my taking the house; but servants, unfortunately, are very credulous and easily frightened. It would be kind of you to tell me exactly what—what thing is supposed to haunt this place.’

  ‘I—er—really don’t know,’ stammered the house agent.

  ‘I am sure you must,’ said the lady quietly. ‘I cannot take the house without knowing. What was it? A murder?’

  ‘Oh! no,’ cried Mr Raddish, shocked by the idea of anything so alien to the respectability of the square. ‘It’s—it’s only a child.’

  ‘A child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know the story exactly,’ he continued reluctantly. ‘Of course, there are all kinds of different versions, but I believe that about thirty years ago a man going by the name of Williams took No. 19. Nothing was known of him; he kept no servants; he had no friends; he seldom went out in the day time. He had one child, a little boy. After he had been there about two months, he went up to London, and had barely set foot in the metropolis before he was recognized as being a man “wanted” by the police on some charge—exactly what, I do not know. But it must have been a grave one, because, sooner than give himself up, he shot himself. Meanwhile, the child lived on here, alone in the house. He had food for a little time, and he waited day after day for his father’s return. Unfortunately, it had been impressed upon him that he was never under any circumstances to go out of the house or speak to anyone. He was a weak, ailing, little creature, and did not dream of disobeying this command. In the night, the neighbours, not knowing that his father had gone away, often heard him sobbing in the awful loneliness and desolation of the empty house.’

  Mr Raddish paused.

  ‘And—er—the child starved to death,’ he concluded, in the same tones as he might have announced that it had just begun to rain.

  ‘And it is the child’s ghost that is supposed to haunt the place?’ asked Mrs Lancaster.

  ‘It is nothing of consequence really,’ Mr Raddish hastened to assure her. ‘There’s nothing seen, not seen, only people say, ridiculous, of course, but they do say they hear—the child—crying, you know.’

  Mrs Lancaster moved towards the front door.

  ‘I like the house very much,’ she said. ‘I shall get nothing as good for the price. I will think it over and let you know.’

  ‘It really looks very cheerful, doesn’t it, Papa?’

  Mrs Lancaster surveyed her new domain with approval. Gay rugs, well-polished furniture, and many knick-knacks, had quite transformed the gloomy aspect of No. 19.

  She spoke to a thin, bent old man with stooping shoulders and a delicate mystical face. Mr Winburn did not resemble his daughter; indeed no greater contrast could be imagined than that presented by her resolute practicalness and his dreamy abstraction.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered with a smile, ‘no one would dream the house was haunted.’

  ‘Papa, don’t talk nonsense! On our first day too.’

  Mr Winburn smiled.

 
; ‘Very well, my dear, we will agree that there are no such things as ghosts.’

  ‘And please,’ continued Mrs Lancaster, ‘don’t say a word before Geoff. He’s so imaginative.’

  Geoff was Mrs Lancaster’s little boy. The family consisted of Mr Winburn, his widowed daughter, and Geoffrey.

  Rain had begun to beat against the window—pitter-patter, pitter-patter.

  ‘Listen,’ said Mr Winburn. ‘Is it not like little footsteps?’

  ‘It is more like rain,’ said Mrs Lancaster, with a smile.

  ‘But that, that is a footstep,’ cried her father, bending forward to listen.

  Mrs Lancaster laughed outright.

  ‘That’s Geoff coming downstairs.’

  Mr Winburn was obliged to laugh too. They were having tea in the hall, and he had been sitting with his back to the staircase. He now turned his chair round to face it.

  Little Geoffrey was coming down, rather slowly and sedately, with a child’s awe of a strange place. The stairs were of polished oak, uncarpeted. He came across and stood by his mother. Mr Winburn gave a slight start. As the child was crossing the floor, he distinctly heard another pair of footsteps on the stairs, as of someone following Geoffrey. Dragging footsteps, curiously painful they were. Then he shrugged his shoulders incredulously. ‘The rain, no doubt,’ he thought.

  ‘I’m looking at the spongecakes,’ remarked Geoff with the admirably detached air of one who points out an interesting fact.

  His mother hastened to comply with the hint.

  ‘Well, Sonny, how do you like your new home?’ she asked.

  ‘Lots,’ replied Geoffrey with his mouth generously filled. ‘Pounds and pounds and pounds.’ After this last assertion, which was evidently expressive of the deepest contentment, he relapsed into silence, only anxious to remove the spongecake from the sight of man in the least time possible.

  Having bolted the last mouthful, he burst forth into speech.

  ‘Oh! Mummy, there’s attics here, Jane says; and can I go at once and eggzplore them? And there might be a secret door, Jane says there isn’t, but I think there must be, and, anyhow, I know there’ll be pipes, water pipes (with a face full of ecstasy) and can I play with them, and, oh! can I go and see the Boi-i-ler?’ He spun out the last word with such evident rapture that his grandfather felt ashamed to reflect that this peerless delight of childhood only conjured up to his imagination the picture of hot water that wasn’t hot, and heavy and numerous plumber’s bills.