The Woman in Black

E >> E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley >> The Woman in Black

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'That is, as far as I can remember, the exact substance of what Manderson said
to me that night. I went to my room, changed into day clothes, and hastily
threw a few necessaries into a kit-bag. My mind was in a whirl, not so much at
the nature of the business as at the suddenness of it. I think I remember
telling you the last time we met'-he turned to Trent--'that Manderson shared
the national fondness for doings things in a story-book style. Other things
being equal, he delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told
myself that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and
rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout leather letter-case, about
eight inches by six, fastened with a strap with a lock on it. I could just
squeeze it into my side-pocket. Then I went to get the car from the garage
behind the house.

'As I was bringing it round to the front a disconcerting thought struck me. I
remembered that I had only a few shillings in my pocket.

'For some time past I had been keeping myself very short of cash, and for this
reason--which I tell you because it is a vital point, as you shall see in a
minute. I was living temporarily on borrowed money. I had always been careless
about money while I was with Manderson, and being a gregarious animal I had
made many friends, some of them belonging to a New York set that had little to
do but get rid of the large incomes given them by their parents. Still, I was
very well paid, and I was too busy even to attempt to go very far with them in
that amusing occupation. I was still well on the right side of the ledger
until I began, merely out of curiosity, to play at speculation. It's a very
old story-- particularly in Wall Street. I thought it was easy; I was lucky at
first; I would always be prudent--and so on. Then came the day when I went out
of my depth. In one week I was separated from my toll, as Bunner expressed it
when I told him; and I owed money too. I had had my lesson. Now in this pass I
went to Manderson and told him what I had done and how I stood. He heard me
with a very grim smile, and then, with the nearest approach to sympathy I had
ever found in him, he advanced me a sum on account of my salary that would
clear me. "Don't play the markets any more," was all he said.

'Now on that Sunday night Manderson knew that I was practically without any
money in the world. He knew that Bunner knew it too. He may have known that I
had even borrowed a little more from Bunner for pocket-money until my next
cheque was due, which, owing to my anticipation of my salary, would not have
been a large one. Bear this knowledge of Manderson's in mind.

'As soon as I had brought the car round I went into the library and stated the
difficulty to Manderson.

'What followed gave me, slight as it was, my first impression of something odd
being afoot. As soon as I mentioned the word "expenses'' his hand went
mechanically to his left hip-pocket, where he always kept a little case
containing notes to the value of about a hundred pounds in our money. This was
such a rooted habit in him that I was astonished to see him check the movement
suddenly. Then, to my greater amazement, he swore under his breath. I had
never heard him do this before; but Bunner had told me that of late he had
often shown irritation in this way when they were alone. "Has he mislaid his
note-case?" was the question that flashed through my mind. But it seemed to me
that it could not affect his plan at all, and I will tell you why. The week
before, when I had gone up to London to carry out various commissions,
including the booking of a berth for Mr George Harris, I had drawn a thousand
pounds for Manderson from his bankers, and all, at his request, in notes of
small amounts. I did not know what this unusually large sum in cash was for,
but I did know that the packets of notes were in his locked desk in the
library, or had been earlier in the day, when I had seen him fingering them as
he sat at the desk.

'But instead of turning to the desk, Manderson stood looking at me. There was
fury in his face, and it was a strange sight to see him gradually master it
until his eyes grew cold again. "Wait in the car," he said slowly. "I will get
some money." We both went out, and as I was getting into my overcoat in the
hall I saw him enter the drawing-which, you remember, was on the other side of
the entrance hall.

'I stepped out on to the lawn before the house and smoked a cigarette, pacing
up and down. I was asking myself again and again where that thousand pounds
was; whether it was in the drawing-room, and if so, why. Presently, as I
passed one of the drawing-room windows, I noticed Mrs Manderson's shadow on
the thin silk curtain. She was standing at her escritoire. The window was
open, and as I passed I heard her say, "I have not quite thirty pounds here.
Will that be enough?" I did not hear the answer, but next moment Manderson's
shadow was mingled with hers, and I heard the chink of money. Then, as he
stood by the window, and as I was moving away, these words of his came to my
ears--and these at least I can repeat exactly, for astonishment stamped them
on my memory--"I'm going out now. Marlowe has persuaded me to go for a
moonlight run in the car. He is very urgent about it. He says it will help me
to sleep, and I guess he is right."

I have told you that in the course of four years I had never once heard
Manderson utter a direct lie about anything, great or small. I believed that I
understood the man's queer, skin-deep morality, and I could have sworn that if
he was firmly pressed with a question that could not be evaded he would either
refuse to answer or tell the truth. But what had I just heard? No answer to
any question. A voluntary statement, precise in terms, that was utterly false.
The unimaginable had happened. It was almost as if some one I knew well, in a
moment of closest sympathy, had suddenly struck me in the face. The blood
rushed to my head, and I stood still on the grass. I stood there until I heard
his step at the front door, and then I pulled myself together and stepped
quickly to the car. He handed me a banker's paper bag with gold and notes in
it. "There's more than you'll want there," he said, and I pocketed it
mechanically.

'For a minute or so I stood discussing with Manderson--it was by one of those
tours de force of which one's mind is capable under great excitement--points
about the route of the long drive before me. I had made the run several times
by day, and I believe I spoke quite calmly and naturally about it. But while I
spoke my mind was seething in a flood of suddenly born suspicion and fear. I
did not know what I feared. I simply felt fear, somehow--I did not know how--
connected with Manderson. My soul once opened to it, fear rushed in like an
assaulting army. I felt--I knew--that something was altogether wrong and
sinister, and I felt myself to be the object of it. Yet Manderson was surely
no enemy of mine. Then my thoughts reached out wildly for an answer to the
question why he had told that lie. And all the time the blood hammered in my
ears, "Where is that money?" Reason struggled hard to set up the suggestion
that the two things were not necessarily connected. The instinct of a man in
danger would not listen to it. As we started, and the car took the curve into
the road, it was merely the unconscious part of me that steered and controlled
it, and that made occasional empty remarks as we slid along in the moonlight.
Within me was a confusion and vague alarm that was far worse than any definite
terror I ever felt.

'About a mile from the house, you remember, one passed on one's left a gate,
on the other side of which was the golf-course. There Manderson said he would
get down, and I stopped the car. "You've got it all clear?" he asked. With a
sort of wrench I forced myself to remember and repeat the directions given me.
"That's OK," he said. "Goodbye, then. Stay with that wallet." Those were the
last words I heard him speak, as the car moved gently away from him.'

Marlowe rose from his chair and pressed his hands to his eyes. He was flushed
with the excitement of his own narrative, and there was in his look a horror
of recollection that held both the listeners silent. He shook himself with a
movement like a dog's, and then, his hands behind him, stood erect before the
fire as he continued his tale.

'I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor car is.'

Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr Cupples, who
cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor cars, readily confessed
to ignorance.

'It is a small round or more often rectangular mirror,' Marlowe explained,
'rigged out from the right side of the screen in front of the driver, and
adjusted in such a way that he can see, without turning round, if anything is
coming up behind to pass him. It is quite an ordinary appliance, and there was
one on this car. As the car moved on, and Manderson ceased speaking behind me,
I saw in that mirror a thing that I wish I could forget.'

Marlowe was silent for a moment, staring at the wall before him.

'Manderson's face,' he said in a low tone. 'He was standing in the road,
looking after me, only a few yards behind, and the moonlight was full on his
face. The mirror happened to catch it for an instant.

'Physical habit is a wonderful thing. I did not shift hand or foot on the
controlling mechanism of the car. Indeed, I dare say it steadied me against
the shock to have myself braced to the business of driving. You have read in
books, no doubt, of hell looking out of a man's eyes, but perhaps you don't
know what a good metaphor that is. If I had not known Manderson was there, I
should not have recognized the face. It was that of a madman, distorted,
hideous in the imbecility of hate, the teeth bared in a simian grin of
ferocity and triumph; the eyes .... In the little mirror I had this glimpse of
the face alone. I saw nothing of whatever gesture there may have been as that
writhing white mask glared after me. And I saw it only for a flash. The car
went on, gathering speed, and as it went, my brain, suddenly purged of the
vapours of doubt and perplexity, was as busy as the throbbing engine before my
feet. I knew.

'You say something in that manuscript of yours, Mr Trent, about the swift
automatic way in which one's ideas arrange themselves about some new
illuminating thought. It is quite true. The awful intensity of ill-will that
had flamed after me from those straining eyeballs poured over my mind like a
searchlight. I was thinking quite clearly now, and almost coldly, for I knew
what--at least I knew whom--I had to fear, and instinct warned me that it was
not a time to give room to the emotions that were fighting to possess me. The
man hated me insanely. That incredible fact I suddenly knew. But the face had
told me, it would have told anybody, more than that. It was a face of hatred
gratified, it proclaimed some damnable triumph. It had gloated over me driving
away to my fate. This too was plain to me. And to what fate?

'I stopped the car. It had gone about two hundred and fifty yards, and a sharp
bend of the road hid the spot where I had set Manderson down. I lay back in
the seat and thought it out. Something was to happen to me. In Paris?
Probably--why else should I be sent there, with money and a ticket? But why
Paris? That puzzled me, for I had no melodramatic ideas about Paris. I put the
point aside for a moment. I turned to the other things that had roused my
attention that evening. The lie about my "persuading him to go for a moonlight
run". What was the intention of that? Manderson, I said to myself, will be
returning without me while I am on my way to Southampton. What will he tell
them about me? How account for his returning alone, and without the car? As I
asked myself that sinister question there rushed into my mind the last of my
difficulties: "Where are the thousand pounds?" And in the same instant came
the answer: "The thousand pounds are in my pocket."

'I got up and stepped from the car. My knees trembled and I felt very sick. I
saw the plot now, as I thought. The whole of the story about the papers and
the necessity of their being taken to Paris was a blind. With Manderson's
money about me, of which he would declare I had robbed him, I was, to all
appearance, attempting to escape from England, with every precaution that
guilt could suggest. He would communicate with the police at once, and would
know how to put them on my track. I should be arrested in Paris, if I got so
far, living under a false name, after having left the car under a false name,
disguised myself, and travelled in a cabin which I had booked in advance, also
under a false name. It would be plainly the crime of a man without money, and
for some reason desperately in want of it. As for my account of the affair, it
would be too preposterous.

'As this ghastly array of incriminating circumstances rose up before me, I
dragged the stout letter-case from my pocket. In the intensity of the moment,
I never entertained the faintest doubt that I was right, and that the money
was there. It would easily hold the packets of notes. But as I felt it and
weighed it in my hands it seemed to me there must be more than this. It was
too bulky. What more was to be laid to my charge? After all, a thousand pounds
was not much to tempt a man like myself to run the risk of penal servitude. In
this new agitation, scarcely knowing what I did, I caught the surrounding
strap in my fingers just above the fastening and tore the staple out of the
lock. Those locks, you know, are pretty flimsy as a rule.'

Here Marlowe paused and walked to the oaken desk before the window. Opening a
drawer full of miscellaneous objects, he took out a box of odd keys, and
selected a small one distinguished by a piece of pink tape.

He handed it to Trent. 'I keep that by me as a sort of morbid memento. It is
the key to the lock I smashed. I might have saved myself the trouble, if I had
known that this key was at that moment in the left-hand side-pocket of my
overcoat. Manderson must have slipped it in, either while the coat was hanging
in the hall or while he sat at my side in the car. I might not have found the
tiny thing there for weeks: as a matter of fact I did find it two days after
Manderson was dead, but a police search would have found it in five minutes.
And then I--I with the case and its contents in my pocket, my false name and
my sham spectacles and the rest of it--I should have had no explanation to
offer but the highly convincing one that I didn't know the key was there.'

Trent dangled the key by its tape idly. Then: 'How do you know this is the key
of that case?' he asked quickly.

'I tried it. As soon as I found it I went up and fitted it to the lock. I knew
where I had left the thing. So do you, I think, Mr Trent. Don't you?' There
was a faint shade of mockery in Marlowe's voice.

'Touche,' Trent said, with a dry smile. 'I found a large empty letter-case
with a burst lock lying with other odds and ends on the dressing-table in
Manderson's room. Your statement is that you put it there. I could make
nothing of it.' He closed his lips.

'There was no reason for hiding it,' said Marlowe. 'But to get back to my
story. I burst the lock of the strap. I opened the case before one of the
lamps of the car. The first thing I found in it I ought to have expected, of
course, but I hadn't.' He paused and glanced at Trent.

'It was--' began Trent mechanically, and then stopped himself. 'Try not to
bring me in any more, if you don't mind,' he said, meeting the other's eye. 'I
have complimented you already in that document on your cleverness. You need
not prove it by making the judge help you out with your evidence.'

'All right,' agreed Marlowe. 'I couldn't resist just that much. If you had
been in my place you would have known before I did that Manderson's little
pocket- case was there. As soon as I saw it, of course, I remembered his not
having had it about him when I asked for money, and his surprising anger. He
had made a false step. He had already fastened his note-case up with the rest
of what was to figure as my plunder, and placed it in my hands. I opened it.
It contained a few notes as usual, I didn't count them.

'Tucked into the flaps of the big case in packets were the other notes, just
as I had brought them from London. And with them were two small wash-leather
bags, the look of which I knew well. My heart jumped sickeningly again, for
this, too, was utterly unexpected. In those bags Manderson kept the diamonds
in which he had been investing for some time past. I didn't open them; I could
feel the tiny stones shifting under the pressure of my fingers. How many
thousands of pounds' worth there were there I have no idea. We had regarded
Manderson's diamond- buying as merely a speculative fad. I believe now that it
was the earliest movement in the scheme for my ruin. For any one like myself
to be represented as having robbed him, there ought to be a strong inducement
shown. That had been provided with a vengeance.

'Now, I thought, I have the whole thing plain, and I must act. I saw instantly
what I must do. I had left Manderson about a mile from the house. It would
take him twenty minutes, fifteen if he walked fast, to get back to the house,
where he would, of course, immediately tell his story of robbery, and probably
telephone at once to the police in Bishopsbridge. I had left him only five or
six minutes ago; for all that I have just told you was as quick thinking as I
ever did. It would be easy to overtake him in the car before he neared the
house. There would be an awkward interview. I set my teeth as I thought of it,
and all my fears vanished as I began to savour the gratification of telling
him my opinion of him. There are probably few people who ever positively
looked forward to an awkward interview with Manderson; but I was mad with
rage. My honour and my liberty had been plotted against with detestable
treachery. I did not consider what would follow the interview. That would
arrange itself.

'I had started and turned the car, I was already going fast toward White
Gables, when I heard the sound of a shot in front of me, to the right.

'Instantly I stopped the car. My first wild thought was that Manderson was
shooting at me. Then I realized that the noise had not been close at hand. I
could see nobody on the road, though the moonlight flooded it. I had left
Manderson at a spot just round the corner that was now about a hundred yards
ahead of me. After half a minute or so, I started again, and turned the corner
at a slow pace. Then I stopped again with a jar, and for a moment I sat
perfectly still.

'Manderson lay dead a few steps from me on the turf within the gate, clearly
visible to me in the moonlight.'

Marlowe made another pause, and Trent, with a puckered brow, enquired, 'On the
golf-course?'

'Obviously,' remarked Mr Cupples. 'The eighth green is just there.' He had
grown more and more interested as Marlowe went on, and was now playing
feverishly with his thin beard.

'On the green, quite close to the flag,' said Marlowe. 'He lay on his back,
his arms were stretched abroad, his jacket and heavy overcoat were open; the
light shone hideously on his white face and his shirt-front; it glistened on
his bared teeth and one of the eyes. The other ... you saw it. The man was
certainly dead. As I sat there stunned, unable for the moment to think at all,
I could even see a thin dark line of blood running down from the shattered
socket to the ear. Close by lay his soft black hat, and at his feet a pistol.

'I suppose it was only a few seconds that I sat helplessly staring at the
body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the truth had
come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my appalling danger. It was
not only my liberty or my honour that the maniac had undermined. It was death
that he had planned for me; death with the degradation of the scaffold. To
strike me down with certainty, he had not hesitated to end his life; a life
which was, no doubt, already threatened by a melancholic impulse to
self-destruction; and the last agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps,
to a devilish joy by the thought that he dragged down my life with his. For as
far as I could see at the moment my situation was utterly hopeless. If it had
been desperate on the assumption that Manderson meant to denounce me as a
thief, what was it now that his corpse denounced me as a murderer?

'I picked up the revolver and saw, almost without emotion, that it was my own.
Manderson had taken it from my room, I suppose, while I was getting out the
car. At the same moment I remembered that it was by Manderson's suggestion
that I had had it engraved with my initials, to distinguish it from a
precisely similar weapon which he had of his own.

'I bent over the body and satisfied myself that there was no life left in it.
I must tell you here that I did not notice, then or afterwards, the scratches
and marks on the wrists, which were taken as evidence of a struggle with an
assailant. But I have no doubt that Manderson deliberately injured himself in
this way before firing the shot; it was a part of his plan.

'Though I never perceived that detail, however, it was evident enough as I
looked at the body that Manderson had not forgotten, in his last act on earth,
to tie me tighter by putting out of court the question of suicide. He had
clearly been at pains to hold the pistol at arm's length, and there was not a
trace of smoke or of burning on the face. The wound was absolutely clean, and
was already ceasing to bleed outwardly. I rose and paced the green, reckoning
up the points in the crushing case against me.

'I was the last to be seen with Manderson. I had persuaded him--so he had lied
to his wife and, as I afterwards knew, to the butler--to go with me for the
drive from which he never returned. My pistol had killed him. It was true that
by discovering his plot I had saved myself from heaping up further
incriminating facts--flight, concealment, the possession of the treasure. But
what need of them, after all? As I stood, what hope was there? What could I
do?'

Marlowe came to the table and leaned forward with his hands upon it. 'I want,'
he said very earnestly, 'to try to make you understand what was in my mind
when I decided to do what I did. I hope you won't be bored, because I must do
it. You may both have thought I acted like a fool. But after all the police
never suspected me. I walked that green for a quarter of an hour, I suppose,
thinking the thing out like a game of chess. I had to think ahead and think
coolly; for my safety depended on upsetting the plans of one of the
longest-headed men who ever lived. And remember that, for all I knew, there
were details of the scheme still hidden from me, waiting to crush me.

'Two plain courses presented themselves at once. Either of them, I thought,
would certainly prove fatal. I could, in the first place, do the completely
straightforward thing: take back the dead man, tell my story, hand over the
notes and diamonds, and trust to the saving power of truth and innocence. I
could have laughed as I thought of it. I saw myself bringing home the corpse
and giving an account of myself, boggling with sheer shame over the absurdity
of my wholly unsupported tale, as I brought a charge of mad hatred and
fiendish treachery against a man who had never, as far as I knew, had a word
to say against me. At every turn the cunning of Manderson had forestalled me.
His careful concealment of such a hatred was a characteristic feature of the
stratagem; only a man of his iron self-restraint could have done it. You can
see for yourselves how every fact in my statement would appear, in the shadow
of Manderson's death, a clumsy lie. I tried to imagine myself telling such a
story to the counsel for my defence. I could see the face with which he would
listen to it; I could read in the lines of it his thought, that to put forward
such an impudent farrago would mean merely the disappearance of any chance
there might be of a commutation of the capital sentence.

'True, I had not fled. I had brought back the body; I had handed over the
property. But how did that help me? It would only suggest that I had yielded
to a sudden funk after killing my man, and had no nerve left to clutch at the
fruits of the crime; it would suggest, perhaps, that I had not set out to kill
but only to threaten, and that when I found that I had done murder the heart
went out of me. Turn it which way I would, I could see no hope of escape by
this plan of action.

'The second of the obvious things that I might do was to take the hint offered
by the situation, and to fly at once. That too must prove fatal. There was the
body. I had no time to hide it in such a way that it would not be found at the
first systematic search. But whatever I should do with the body, Manderson's
not returning to the house would cause uneasiness in two or three hours at
most. Martin would suspect an accident to the car, and would telephone to the
police. At daybreak the roads would be scoured and enquiries telegraphed in
every direction. The police would act on the possibility of there being foul
play. They would spread their nets with energy in such a big business as the
disappearance of Manderson. Ports and railway termini would be watched. Within
twenty-four hours the body would be found, and the whole country would be on
the alert for me--all Europe, scarcely less; I did not believe there was a
spot in Christendom where the man accused of Manderson's murder could pass
unchallenged, with every newspaper crying the fact of his death into the ears
of all the world. Every stranger would be suspect; every man, woman, and child
would be a detective. The car, wherever I should abandon it, would put people
on my track. If I had to choose between two utterly hopeless courses, I
decided, I would take that of telling the preposterous truth.

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