Margaret Millar - The Devil Loves Me

They were lucky. The second room they looked at was the bathroom beside Duncan’s room. There were unmistakable signs that someone had crawled through the window: the soot on the outside ledge was disturbed and several strands of lint were caught in the roughened wood.

“Nerve,” Sands said. “Or desperation. Or both. Where could the sheets have been tied to?”

Prye pointed. “The toilet. That would give the whole thing a nice homey touch.”

“Ridiculous, isn’t it? A grim and desperate murderer tying a sheet round a toilet, all done in perfect seriousness.” He looked out of the window again. “The tree there would prevent anyone from accidentally seeing the operation. The bathroom door would be locked — perfectly legitimate. And the sheets? Brought in under a bathrobe, I suppose, taken out the same way, thrown down the laundry chute, recovered later, and put in the furnace. Neat. Nothing incriminating. Baths are being taken all the time. Question is, did the policeman notice who went into this bathroom?”

The policeman, roused out of bed by the telephone, did not know. Everyone, he said, was going into bathrooms at that time. They were all retiring. Naturally he paid no attention.

“Naturally,” Sands repeated to Prye with a grimace. “Probably closed his eyes to avoid embarrassing the ladies.”

He left Prye standing in the hall and went outside by the back door. Two men were putting Sammy Twist on a stretcher and covering him. When the cover was over him Sammy didn’t look human at all. He was still curled up like a baby.

Sands said, “Wait!” and went over and lifted the cover from Sammy’s face.

“Can’t you — straighten him out a little?” he asked the men who were carrying the stretcher.

The men looked at him in surprise. One of them opened his mouth to speak hut Sands said coldly, “What I mean is, he looks a bit — messy. Oh well. Never mind. Go ahead.”

He walked off, shrugging his shoulders.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” one of the men said. “Looks messy, does he? It ain’t enough that the poor guy is murdered, he’s got to look cute. That Sands has no heart.”

“He ain’t human,” the other man agreed.

They had a profound discussion on Sands’ inhumanity all the way to the morgue.

Sands walked back to the house, thinking, I’ll have to be more careful. I’m getting soft. When he went into the hall he saw Dinah coming down the steps toward him. She was moving slowly and carefully, like a woman who has been ill for a long time. Sands noticed for the first time how thin she was, with the thinness and awkwardness of a schoolgirl.

He said, “I’m sorry you had such an unpleasant experience, Mrs. Revel.”

Her eyes looked at him blankly for a moment. “Yes, it was unpleasant. I don’t want to think about it.” She shivered. “He was cold... cold. Was that your Sammy Twist?”

Sands nodded.

“He was awfully young,” Dinah said, stroking the banister with her hand. Little whining cats, she thought, that rub up against your leg for sympathy. “I was never young. When I was born I looked like a little old man, I’m told, all wrinkled and gray.”

“Most babies are red,” Sands said.

“Yes, I know. I was gray. A little old man.” She came down the rest of the steps, stroking the banister as she moved, her face strange and dreamy like a cat’s. “Of course I should never have been born at all.”

“No,” Sands said, fascinated by the movement of her hand, soft and quick on the banister.

“My mother was shocked when she saw me. She thought she was going to have a baby and then she saw me, a little gray old man. Obscene, isn’t it?”

He wanted to escape from her. He wanted to tell her to keep her chin up or to go to hell, he didn’t care which.

Jackson came out of the kitchen, ringing the bell for lunch. Dinah walked away, without speaking, toward the dining room.

“Will you be having lunch, sir?” Jackson asked.

“No, thanks,” Sands said.

He shut himself up in the library before anyone else appeared.

Dinah stood by the buffet looking at herself in the mirror. I look crazy, she thought, like a crazy, white-faced witch. Nobody would be in love with me, certainly not George. Witch—

She knew it was George coming in by the sound of his step, but she didn’t turn around.

“Hello, Dinah,” Revel said. “I’ve been talking to Prye.”

“He has no right to talk about me to anyone,” she said without turning around.

“He wasn’t talking about you but about me. He thinks I’m a heel. I’m inclined to agree. I must be getting senile.”

“You’ll be thirty-three in two weeks.”

“Will I?” He seemed surprised. “You must remember to send me a pint of cyanide for my birthday.”

“Where are you going after... after all this?”

“Home,” he said. “Unless the police choose a new address for me.”

“Home,” she repeated. “Where do you live, George?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Same place.”

“Is it exactly the same?”

“I think so.”

It seemed strange to her that it should be exactly the same. She said, “Except my room, of course.”

He looked at her gravely. “Your room is exactly the same too. I like yellow curtains.”

“So do I. Like the sun.”

“Yes, like the sun,” he said.

Their breathing was quick and uneven. She turned her head away.

“You’ll come back,” he said.

“No.” She lifted her hand slowly to her head. “No, it’s too late.”

Prye came in with Nora and her mother, and then Jane and Aspasia clinging to each other, two gloomy wraiths. Jane’s eyes were swollen and the lids were pink and transparent.

“What’s the matter with Jane?” Prye asked Nora in a whisper.

“What’s the matter with all of us?” Nora said. “Murders. Our emotions don’t operate on the sub-zero level that yours do. Besides, she’s just found out that Duncan left her almost nothing.”

“Who told her?”

“Dinah,” Nora said grimly. “Who else?”

Jackson came in with the soup. When he had gone out again, Mrs. Shane said, “Do let us have a pleasant meal for once. I’m sure everything will turn out all right and that all of us will come out unscathed.”

Aspasia was in the grip of the tragic muse again. “I might have saved these young men,” she said sonorously. “But no, no one would listen to me. I was scorned, even as Christ and Cassandra—”

“And President Roosevelt,” Dinah said.

“I might have saved them.”

“How?” Mrs. Shane inquired acidly.

“By concentrating on Good,” Aspasia replied.

“Nobody was stopping you.”

“It requires more than one.”

“Aunt Aspasia is right!” Jane cried defiantly. “If you hadn’t all been so unpleasant, so offensive even— But you have been and you are and you always will be! And now I’m going to s-s-starve to death.”

“The argument is a little hard to follow,” Prye said. “Are you going to starve because we’re offensive or—”

Jane turned to him. “And you! You’re supposed to be a detective and you haven’t detected anything, not a single thing. If I were Nora I’d think twice before marrying you, I’d think twice!”

Prye said to Nora, “You did, didn’t you, darling?”

Nora grinned and said that if all her thoughts on the subject were laid end to end they’d reach from the level of the present conversation to that of the Einstein theory.

“I don’t want any lunch,” Jane said stiffly.

“That’s fine,” Dinah said. “Good common sense. If you’re going to starve anyway you might as well train for it. Eventually, why not now?”

“Oh, do sit down, Jane!” Mrs. Shane exclaimed. “Don’t be so childish. Really, you’d think I was running a boardinghouse the way people jump up and down and dash in and out at mealtime. Jane!”