Dennis Wheatley - To The Devil A Daughter

`Here's to our success in that, then.'

They clinked glasses and drank. The brandy was not of very good quality, but it was nonetheless welcome at the moment. John's shoes were soaked right through from standing about in the mud and wet, while C. B. had had to leave his hat and coat in the Canon's house; so he had since had a steady wetting from the drizzling rain. Both were feeling the chill of the raw night; and, although their behaviour was now light hearted, beneath the surface the nerves of neither of them had yet fully recovered from the shaking they had had in the crypt.

Warmed in body and fortified in mind by the fiery spirit, they put the glasses back and resumed their reconnaissance. While they were drinking, C. B. had already surveyed the dining room, and it contained no piece of furniture in which it seemed likely that papers would be kept; so they went out into the hall and tried a door under the stairs. It led only to a stone flagged passage, which was obviously the way to the kitchen quarters. Closing it quietly, C. B. shot its bolt, so that should Jutson be roused and, entering the house by a back door, seek to come through it, he would find his way blocked. They then tip toed across to the door opposite and, opening it, found themselves in a study, three walls of which were lined shoulder high with books.

'Ah, this looks more promising,' C. B. murmured, as the torch lit up a big roll top desk. `You stay by the door, John, and keep your ears open, just in case the Jutsons are not asleep yet and we have disturbed them. If you hear anyone trying that door across the hall that leads to the kitchen quarters, slip in and warn me. We'll have time then to get back into the drawing room and out of the front windows.'

While he was speaking he walked to the study window and drew its curtains as a precaution against the Jutsons seeing a light in the room, for it looked out on to the backyard. Then, producing a bunch of queer looking keys from his pocket, he set to work on the desk. In less than a minute he had its roll top open.

With swift, practised fingers he went systematically through one pigeon hole after another. When he had done, the owner of the desk would never have guessed that the papers it contained had been examined; but the search had revealed nothing of interest. The pigeon holes and shallow drawers held only Henry Beddows' household accounts, note paper, cheque books, pencils, rubbers and so on. None of the bills or receipts suggested any activity which could be considered unorthodox.

C. B. was just about to reclose the desk top when John stepped back through the door and swiftly swung it nearly shut.

`What is it?' C. B. asked below his breath.

`The clanking of that chain again,' John whispered. He was still holding the door a few inches open. C. B. stepped up to him and, their heads cocked slightly sideways, they listened with straining ears for some moments.

As no further sound reached them, John mumbled rather shamefacedly

`Sorry. I could have sworn I heard a chain being dragged across the floor somewhere at the top of the house; but I must have been mistaken. Nerves, I suppose.'

`The dank, unlived in atmosphere of this place is enough to give anyone the willies,' C. B, said understandingly. `It was probably a fall of soot in one of the chimneys brought down by the rain.'

Returning to the desk, he closed its top, and set about opening the drawers in its two pedestals, most of which were locked. The locked ones he found to contain a number of stamp albums and the impedimenta of a philatelist.

A glance showed him that the albums covered only the British Empire. Quickly he flicked, through a couple of them and saw that they were a fairly valuable collection. Then he noticed a curious thing. The pages for some of the smaller Colonies had on them the remains of a number of stamp hinges but not a single stamp of any denomination. Turning to John he said

`This is interesting. Beddows evidently started a general collection of the British Empire; then, unless I'm right off the mark, he began to specialize in Barbados, Cyprus and perhaps a few other places. Being a rich man, he could afford to buy rarities and his special collections soon grew too valuable for him to leave them with the rest; so he removed his pet Colonies into a separate album.'

`Where does that get us?' asked John, a little mystified.

`Come, come, my dear Watson. Surely you realise that a keen philatelist would never keep the best part of his collection in his office, where he couldn't look at it in the evenings. The fact that it is not here suggests that it is in a safe somewhere in the house. If Christina's papa has a safe, it is there that he would also keep the sort of highly private papers in which we are interested.'

`That sounds logical; but if there is a safe surely it would be a bit beyond you to get it open?'

`Probably but not necessarily. If it is an old type, patience and my skeleton keys might do the trick. Anyhow it would be worth trying.'

Returning the stamp albums to their drawers C. B. relocked them. He had already noticed a door between two sets of bookshelves that stood against the further wall. Walking over, he opened it and looked through. The room beyond was another sitting room. From some fashion magazines, a bowl of pot pourri and a work basket it looked as if it might be Christina's sanctum on the rare

occasions when she was at home. After a quick glance round he left it and they returned to the hall.

Next to the passage leading to the kitchen they found a breakfast room, and beyond it another room that was half pantry, half flower room. Neither contained anything having the remotest resemblance to a safe; so, as they had now explored all the downstairs living rooms without success, it seemed that if there was a safe in the house at all it must be up in Beddows' bedroom.

At the foot of the main staircase they paused, while C. B. shone his torch upward. No movement was to be seen and no sound reached them. Yet the very silence of the damp, chill house seemed to have something vaguely sinister about it; so that, instead of advancing boldly, both of them half held their breath and trod gently as they went upstairs.

They were within two steps of the main landing, and could see across it to a dark rectangle between a pair of oak uprights, through which a narrower flight of stairs led to the top floor of the house, when the clanking came again.

This time it was distinct and unmistakable; a noise of chains being dragged across a wooden floor. The sound was so eerie, so uncanny, in that dark, deserted house that it caused their hearts to leap. The blood seemed to freeze in their veins, and momentarily they were inflicted with a semi paralysis. Yet it was the very terror that caused their throats to close and their muscles to contract that saved C. B. from a broken neck.

He was in the act of planting his right foot on the landing.. Instead of coming down firmly, it was arrested in mid air by the same nervous shock that made his scalp prickle. For a second or so it hovered; then, by no act of will but by the residue of its own momentum, it sank gently on to the carpet.

The carpet gave as though it was a feather bed. There came a faint snap, then a swift slithering noise. A large piece of carpet suddenly flopped downwards from the topmost stair. Its loose end and sides had been secured to the main carpet of the landing only by threads. It now hung straight down between the newel post of the banisters and the wall, leaving a four foot square gulf of blackness.

The square of carpet at the stair head had been cunningly suspended to conceal the fact that the flooring beneath it had been removed. Anyone stepping firmly upon it must have been flung down into the hall fifteen feet below.

C. B. gasped, staggered, and recovered his balance. Then, flashing his torch through the gaping hole that the vanished carpet had left in the nearest corner of the landing he muttered