Mark Aldridge - The Passing of Mr Quinn

Eleanor Appleby in dressing-gown and slippers rushed into the room, followed by two frightened maids in their night attire, the old cook and housekeeper, who had managed Professor Appleby’s menage for a generation, and Vera, the house parlourmaid, who alone seemed to remain calm.

‘Why—what—good heavens!’ Eleanor exclaimed, staring with dilated eyes at the huddled figure of her husband in the arm-chair.

He managed to turn to her with glazed eyes half-opened, and dying, his hatred stabbed at her from those eyes.

‘I’ve been poisoned,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Poisoned by—by—’ his eyes wandered round the room, and fixed Vera and then Derek Capel, who had entered quietly.

He subsided in the arm-chair, his last breath spent in that accusation.

There was a pregnant pause, filled with the gasps of those in the room. The servants, for the most part, were petrified with fear. The old cook could not even wail. She was sucking in breath like a fish out of water, her ample bosom heaving spasmodically. Amongst the servants only Vera, the parlourmaid, remained calm, and there was a contemptuous curl to her lips that could hardly be deemed respectful in the presence of death.

Eleanor was trembling violently, and her childish face was pitiful.

‘Derek—hold me,’ she whispered. ‘I—I feel I’m going to faint.’

There were tiny beads of perspiration on Derek Capel’s brow. His face was pale beneath his tan, and quivering as he put an arm round her. He was hardly more collected than she, but he appeared to make a great effort.

‘It’s a great shock,’ he said in a low tone. ‘Er—if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll have a spot of something to pull me together.’

He made a movement towards the round mahogany table, and took up the port decanter. But as he did so his hand shook violently, and in his eyes—studiously averted from the decanter he had picked up—there was a look of stark fear.

Eleanor bit her white lips. She could have cried out as she saw him take out the stopper. He was pouring the liquid in a glass with a shaking hand that spilled a little of it on the carpet. And Vera, the house parlourmaid, was watching the procedure through narrowed lids.

Suddenly Eleanor Appleby’s body springs were released. With a little cry, half moan, she darted forward and took the decanter from him. He yielded it to her grasp like a child, and looked at her stupidly as she tried to smile at him—a twisted, agonised little smile that struggled like the sun against the clouds.

‘Don’t, Derek,’ she whispered. ‘Not that. You—I’m going to play the game through to the end.’

She seemed on the verge of fainting. And then all of a sudden she gave a little gasp.

‘Oh!’

There was a sound of a crash. The decanter had slipped from her nerveless fingers, and now it lay on the floor, its glass shattered in pieces, and the red port streamed over the carpet in a blood-like pool.

A silence fell.

Eleanor moved across the room with faltering steps, and then suddenly threw up her arms like a baffled swimmer and nearly collapsed on the floor. Just in time, however, the old gardener, George—he who had taken her message to Derek Capel that night—dashed forward from the curtained doorway and caught her, leading her to a chair.

There she lay inertly, her hands covering her face and short dry gasps coming from her lips. Her fair hair had become loose and flowed over her shoulders, enveloping her like a cloud.

Derek Capel had made no move to help her. He stared down at the red pool on the floor, and something like a sigh was forced from his lips. He set down the glass at length, which contained merely enough dregs to cover the bottom.

‘Well, we’d better ’phone the police, I suppose,’ he said, with a dry rattle in his throat.

His dark, strangely handsome face working convulsively he crossed to the telephone in the hall. In a few moments he was in communication with the local police station and giving them particulars of what had happened.

All this time, Vera, the house parlourmaid, was regarding her mistress with a curious intentness. A tiny smile twitched scornfully on her lips, and once or twice she nodded slightly as one who should say: ‘I know something about this, and I mean to tell it.’

Vera, indeed, was amazingly self-possessed for one who saw her illicit lover lying huddled in a chair with death’s cold touch upon his face. A lover, moreover, from whom she had expected certain things, and who had betrayed and spurned her. She might scarce have been expected to weep, yet a little natural agitation would not have been incongruous to the occasion.

And so the police found them when they arrived scarcely more than five minutes later at the Lodge. Chief Inspector Brent of the C.I.D. of Scotland Yard, whose home happened to be in this quiet Sussex village, had been at the local police station when the late night call came through, and so the case had the attention of one of the most alert and keenly analytical criminal brains in the country right from the commencement.

Chief Inspector Brent was one who never placed too great a discount on first impressions. As he strode into the study his narrowed eyes took in every detail of the tableau, and noted all the persons in it, their position and demeanour.

The two maidservants, exhausted from hysterical weeping, but still too frightened to come directly into the study, were hanging back with the old housekeeper behind the curtains that, half-drawn, separated the study from the hall. The old gardener, George, was with them, stolid as ever, but with a hint of defiance in his seamed face.

Chief Inspector Brent glanced at them, then at Vera, whose general air was one of suppressed excitement, triumph and malice. Her eyes were very bright, and malice was very apparent in them as she looked from the detective to her mistress.

Inspector Brent ruled out all the servants as being of little consequence in the matter, except Vera.

His swift survey of the scene stopped at Derek Capel, who had now assumed a nonchalant attitude, and was smoking a cigarette. ‘You rang up the station, sir,’ he said, rather as if stating a fact than asking a question.

Derek Capel nodded. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘As you see, Professor Appleby has died—suddenly. It seemed to me to be a matter for the police.’

‘Quite right,’ said the inspector, smiling ironically and twisting his heavy moustache. ‘Ah, what’s that?’ he exclaimed. And as if noticing it for the first time, he crossed to the broken decanter and knelt beside the pool of wine on the carpet.

There was a queer tension—a silence. Every one except Eleanor Appleby craned forward as if noticing it, too, for the first time. That tell-tale decanter quite obviously contained the key to the riddle of Professor Appleby’s death.

‘I imagine that the professor was taking his nightcap of port when he—er—collapsed,’ Derek Capel said in a voice that sounded ragged somehow.

Inspector Brent slewed his head round to look at him, his face very keen.

‘The assumption being that he had some kind of fit, eh?’ he drawled, jerking erect. ‘Yes; that seems to fit the case.’ He took out his notebook, making entries and glancing at the professor, whose disordered hair and collar torn from the stud were eloquent of his death agonies; from the professor he looked repeatedly down at the broken decanter and the pool of wine that stained the carpet. Whatever his deductions may have been—and we can assume that Chief Inspector Brent was no fool—there was one in the room who was determined that he should not for a moment form a wrong impression as to how the decanter had been broken.

Vera plucked at his sleeve. The flags of colour had mounted to her cheeks, and her bosom was heaving madly. Her voice had acquired a shrill breathlessness.