Ellery Queen's Eyewitnesses Page 14

  A click.

  And then there was nothing but silence.

  Barry Perowne

  Raffles and the Unique Bequest

  As it happened, I was with A. J. Raffles when he had occasion, one hot day in London, to call at a hotel in the aristocratic Mayfair neighborhood.

  Grey-toppered and equipped with binoculars, we were on our way to Ascot Races, a fashionable event in the summer social calendar, and at the hotel reception desk we chanced to find the manager himself.

  “Good morning,” said Raffles. “Will you please have Miss Dinah Raffles informed that Mr. Manders and I are here to take her to Ascot?”

  Immaculately frockcoated, the manager drew himself up with unexpected hauteur.

  “I feel obliged to notify you, Mr. Raffles,” he said, “that Miss Raffles has a person with her in her apartment.”

  “A person?” said Raffles.

  “As you are Miss Raffles’ brother,” the manager said stiffly, “it were perhaps better that Miss Raffles herself account to you for the company she is keeping.”

  “Very well,” Raffles said, with a frown, “we’ll go up.” He turned to me. “Come on, Bunny.”

  Not liking the hotel manager’s tone, I felt rather uneasy as I accompanied Raffles upstairs. His sister Dinah had been in London only a week, and we knew as yet little about her. Seven years his junior, she had grown up under guardianship far apart from him, owing to their parents’ early demise. Now twenty-one, and seeing her brother’s name often in the newspapers, as he was currently England’s cricket captain, she had grown so curious about him that she suddenly had taken it into her head to come to London and share his life.

  There being a side to his life which she must not know about, let alone share, her unforeseen advent had been disturbing for him, and I knew that he planned to amass a dowry for her so that he could get her safely married into some good European family, well away from England, before he should be exposed as a criminal and the consequent scandal should damage Dinah’s prospects. Meantime, as women were ineligible for residence in the Albany, where Raffles had his bachelor chambers, he had engaged a suite for Dinah in this irreproachable Mayfair hotel.

  The suite was on the third floor and, being at the rear, was free of the constant harness-jingle of passing cabs and carriages.

  Raffles knocked on the door. There was no answer. He tried the door-handle. The door was not locked. I followed him into Dinah’s sitting-room. It was flooded with sunshine from the wide-open casement window. Dinah was not in the room. The door to the bedroom was closed. Raffles gave it a hard look.

  “Dinah?” he called.

  I heard movements in the bedroom. The door opened and Dinah emerged. Closing the door carefully, she turned to us. She was wearing a delightful dress that Raffles had bought her for the races at Ascot. Now that he felt himself responsible for her, nothing was too good for his young sister—and indeed, with her fair hair and grey eyes, she did him much credit. She moved to the window, beckoned us to join her.

  “You see that little garden down there?” she said.

  Open to the public, yet seldom frequented, the garden was one of those sylvan corners that abound in Mayfair. Butterflies were flickering in the noonday heatshine over the vivid flowerbeds.

  “This morning, at about eight o’clock,” Dinah told us, “as I was having my coffee at this table by the window, I noticed a young lady all alone in that garden. She was sitting on a seat near that camellia tree down there. It still has a few blossoms left on it, and she’d evidently picked one. She was elegantly dressed, and so lovely, with her dark hair and pale, exquisite profile, that she fascinated me. She seemed so alone, sitting there holding the flower loosely in her lap, and she sat so awfully still that I had a feeling she’d been there all night. And—she reminded me of someone.”

  “Who?” said Raffles.

  “It didn’t come to me,” Dinah said, “until I went into my bedroom to dress. I kept thinking about her. And it dawned on me that what I was beginning to remember, because of the flower she was holding, was a novel I’d read. It was about a lady who had many lovers, but died young, all alone in a garden—with a flower in her hands.”

  “La dame aux camélias,” Raffles said quietly, “by Alexandre Dumas fils.”

  “When I remembered the novel,” Dinah said, “I felt rather worried. I came back to this window and looked out. She hadn’t moved. I hurried downstairs and went round to the garden gate, which is in a side turning. I sat down beside her on the seat and said, ‘Good morning.’ She didn’t move or answer, so I—touched her hands.”

  “Did you now,” Raffles said softly.

  “She opened her eyes,” said Dinah. “Oh, I was so relieved! But she was so pale and she looked at me so vaguely that I said I was afraid she was unwell and if she’d like to lie down for a while, I lived nearby. She murmured something about ‘dinner,’ so I thought she might be hungry. I asked her. She smiled faintly and said something about dinner waiting for her in London every evening at eight, or eighty-eight, or eight-to-eight—something like that, but she has a slight foreign accent, and she was so vague and weak, her mind seemed to be wandering. But I’m sure she had been on that seat all night—and her weakness was from hunger.”

  “How can you be sure?” Raffles asked.

  “Because I brought her here,” said Dinah. “I had to help her up the stairs. My breakfast-tray was still here, with some croissants on it. The coffee and the milk were still warm, and she was so glad of them that I could tell she was simply starving!”

  “And now?” Raffles said.

  “I made her lie down on my bed, and she’s sound asleep,” said Dinah. “This little purse and these white-lace gloves on the table are hers. I brought them up from the garden seat. She’s Russian, her name’s Lydia, and she’s a ballerina.”

  “A ballerina?” Raffles and I exclaimed.

  “I thought she wouldn’t mind,” Dinah said, “if I looked in her purse to see if I could find her address, in case somebody waiting anxiously there should be informed where she is.”

  “Sound thinking,” said Raffles.

  “But you see?” Dinah showed us the contents of the dainty little purse. “There are just her maquillage things, her handkerchief embroidered with the name Lydia, this cardboard ticket—”

  “A pawn ticket,” said Raffles, examining it, “for an article pledged in Nice.”

  “And there’s this lovely photograph of her,” Dinah said. “From the photographer’s stamp on the back, it must have been taken in Moscow.”

  The small photograph was of a young ballerina held gracefully in mid-air by a handsome male dance partner strikingly virile in skin-fitting tights.

  “I must stay and look after her, of course,” said Dinah, “so I’m afraid I can’t come to Ascot with you. But I insist that you two go. There’s nothing you can do here.”

  “Except mollify the hotel manager,” said Raffles. “He must have seen you helping the ballerina upstairs and he probably thought she was the worse for liquor. Never mind, Dinah, I’ll have a word with him, book a room here for your guest to move into, and Bunny and I’ll return this evening to see how she is.”

  When we dropped in at the hotel that evening, Dinah reported that her guest had wakened, taken a little nourishment, and gone to sleep again. Dinah had decided to stay at the bedside and have her own dinner sent up on a tray.

  “She seems fascinated by her guest,” Raffles said as we emerged from the hotel. “And Dinah may well be right in saying that somebody may be waiting for Lydia—waiting anxiously somewhere.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but where?”

  “Lydia made a strange remark, Bunny. She was near collapse from hunger,” Raffles said, “yet she seems to have implied that every evening, somewhere in London, there’s a dinner awaiting her—dinner at eight or something to that approximate effect. A mere hunger fantasy? Maybe. But if she really has such an appointment, doesn’t it usually take two person
s to make a dinner date? In which case, might not the other party to the nightly appointment be faithfully keeping it—and growing more and more anxious? So wouldn’t the logical place for us to look for that anxious person be—the appointed rendezvous?”

  “But we haven’t a clue where it is.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, Bunny. As a matter of fact, I always carry a number of cards in my wallet—cards that come my way, from time to time, from persons of influence. One never knows,” Raffles said, giving me a wicked look, “when the right card, presented at the right place, may come in useful.” He hailed a passing hansom. “Cab!”

  The destination at which Raffles presently paid off the cabbie proved to be a tall, rather dilapidated house in one of those rundown old streets that huddle in the vicinity of Drury Lane Theatre and Co vent Garden fruit-and-flower market. The cab jingled away along the otherwise deserted street, and from the nearby market an aroma of wilting blossoms was tainting the warm, mauve twilight as I followed Raffles up two worn stone steps to the door of the dilapidated house.

  He beat a rat-a-tat with the iron knocker. Echoes clapped away along the narrow street. Peering at the shabby door, I made out on it the tarnished brass numeral: 88.

  The door opened. Framed against gaslight from within stood an impeccably liveried footman.

  “Good evening,” said Raffles. “I have here the card of a gentleman known to you. He’s kindly written a note of introduction on it.”

  “This gentleman,” replied the footman, scrutinizing the card, “is certainly well known here at Eighty-Eight. If you care to step in, I will inquire if it is feasible to accommodate you at such short notice.”

  Thus invited, we stepped into a narrow hallway, oak-paneled and richly carpeted. To the left was a row of tall-backed, carven chairs. Indicating them to us, the footman went off, taking the card Raffles had presented, and disappeared between heavy curtains of crimson velvet that flanked a carpeted staircase leading up from the back of the hallway.

  Two other men, who like ourselves appeared to be waiting, were standing before a Louis XVI marquetry table to the right. They were studying a large, gilt-framed painting on the paneled wall there.

  “Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe,” the shorter of the men said. A platter-hatted priest of sturdy stature, he had a large, napkin-covered basket on his arm. “I’m told, Gilbert, that this painting is esteemed by competent critics, a masterpiece of the modern ‘naturalistic’ school.”

  “The fallacy of modern ‘naturalism,’” objected the other man, who, though much younger than the priest, towered over him in height and conspicuously outdid him in girth, “is that it is highly unnatural.”

  Wearing a bohemian black cloak, and with a black slouch hat in one hand and a stout walking-stick hooked on his arm, the younger man had bushy hair of a chestnut hue. Studying the painting through ribboned eyeglasses held at a distance from his eyes, he pursed his lips disparagingly under the eaves of his moustache.

  “Admittedly,” he said, “the subject of this painting—this woodland picnic, with naked ladies seated on grass—is quite appropriate to Eighty-Eight here, where you tell me that gourmets foregather. But let me venture the modest suggestion that this alleged ‘masterpiece’ flouts plausibility. These ladies in the buff—saving your presence, Father—would not be, as depicted, tranquilly picnicking. Far from it! In reality, they would be tormented to the point of hysteria by the attentions of wasps, spiders, and hairy centipedes.”

  “I’m afraid, Gilbert,” said the priest, with a smile, “that you have a tendency to disputation. I’ve often noticed it in our discussions of theology.”

  “As a mere amateur in that subject, Father,” said the large bohemian, “I seek light from you. But art is another matter. Tchah, I snap my fingers at this decadent daub!”

  He did so—with such scorn that the gesture dislodged the walking-stick from his arm. Raffles, in his courteous way, picked up the stick, and, restoring it to its owner, was rewarded with expostulations of gratitude—which were curtailed by the arrival of a footman who, liveried like the one who had admitted us, descended the staircase and addressed himself respectfully to the priest.

  “The patron,” said the footman, “presents his apologies for keeping you waiting, Father. His gout is troublesome tonight, but he would appreciate a word with you in his bureau abovestairs. Allow me to relieve you of your basket.”

  “Have you told the patron,” asked the priest, “that I have a friend, a rising poet and journalist, with me this evening?”

  “The patron,” said the footman reassuringly, “will be charmed to make your friend’s acquaintance.”

  “Come, then, Gilbert,” said the priest, “and remember that I have your word to write nothing about the matter that brings me to this place.”

  “In London literary salons,” declared the poet, plodding massively upstairs at the priest’s heels, “my word is warranted sterling—I hope!”

  The footman having made off somewhere with the priest’s basket, the departure upstairs of the two theologians left Raffles and myself alone in the hallway, and Raffles murmured, “Bunny, does that huge, cloaked poet remind you of someone?”

  “Porthos,” I said, “in The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas peré.”

  “Exactly,” said Raffles, “and, oddly enough, that walking-stick of his weighs heavy in the hand. It’s a swordstick!”

  Just then the footman who had admitted us reappeared from between the crimson curtains and said he was pleased to announce that Monsieur Kash found it feasible to accommodate us. Bidding us leave our toppers on the marquetry table, where he said they would be seen to, the footman piloted us between the curtains, along a carpeted corridor, into a panelled dining-room.

  Here its supervisor, Monsieur Kash, who was of a square shape and had black hair cut en brosse, conducted us to a table, where he would have placed menus in our hands but Raffles said that, this being our first visit to Eighty-Eight, we felt we would do well to leave the selection of our repast to Monsieur Kash himself.

  “I shall hope, then,” Monsieur Kash said with a gratified twinkle, “to prove worthy of your compliment.”

  As he withdrew, I scanned the dining-room. The diners at the other tables seemed for the most part to be in affluent middle age, the gentlemen expansive of shirtfront and rubicund of complexion, their ladies elaborately coiffured and graciously ample of flesh. Mastication largely precluded the flow of conversation, the diners seeming wholly absorbed in their enjoyment of a succulent gastronomy.

  Nowhere among the dedicated bon viveurs could I see anybody dining alone with a worried expression and anxious glances toward the door. But Raffles touched me on the arm, murmuring, “The flowers on the table in the corner to your left are different from those on the other tables. Take a look.”

  I saw his point in a flash.

  “Camellias,” I breathed.

  “Note the significant proceedings,” said Raffles.

  An uncanny performance was in progress at the corner table, which was set for one person. Though no person occupied the chair at the table, dinner was being served there. A waiter was pouring wine reverently from a cobwebbed bottle reclining in a wicker cradle. Beside the table stood a naperied trolley. At this a sous-chef in starched white tunic and yard-high hat was cooking a delicacy in a chafing-dish over the pulsating flame of a spirit-lamp.

  The sous-chef exhibited the contents of the chafing-dish to the empty chair for approval, then transferred the delicacy to a plate. His colleague, the waiter, took up the plate and placed it before the invisible diner. After a moment the waiter took up the plate again, its contents in no way disturbed, and replaced it on the trolley, which was wheeled away by the sous-chef.

  It was deftly done.

  “Don’t stare, Bunny,” Raffles murmured.

  Notwithstanding his admonition, I could not keep myself from watching, sidelong, the faultless service of successive courses and wines at the table with no visible diner.
It haunted me. I was quite unable to give our own dinner the attention it merited—but when Monsieur Kash came to inquire if everything was satisfactory, I tactfully echoed Raffles’ commendations.

  “Though we must admit, Monsieur Kash,” Raffles added, “to a curiosity about what’s been taking place at that corner table with the camellias on it.”

  “Ah, table twelve,” said Monsieur Kash. “Our regular diners have been long accustomed to the sight you mention. In fact, they have seen it seven-hundred and twenty-nine times—counting this, the penultimate evening for it.”

  “Penultimate?” Raffles said.

  Monsieur Kash seemed pleased by our interest.

  “At a time,” he told us, “when the Royal Nevsky Ballet, from Moscow, was visiting London, it played a limited season at Drury Lane Theatre, just around the corner. One of our regular diners, a well known London stockbroker, a bachelor of mature years and a notable gourmet, conceived an infatuation for a young dancer in the corps-de-ballet.”

  Raffles and I exchanged a glance.

  “He married her,” said Monsieur Kash, “and one night, not long afterward, he brought her here to dine. I was not on duty that night, but I knew that the gentleman had taken great pains about the dinner, specifying the dishes in advance—his favorite table to be reserved, her favorite floral decoration for it. Gentlemen, he had a purpose.”

  “Indeed?” said Raffles.

  “It was to awaken her,” Monsieur Kash explained, “to the importance of proper dining. His purpose was evident, I was told, in the detail with which he enumerated to her the courses they were about to eat, with particulars of the ingredients and preparation of the various dishes, and the provenance of the wines that would accompany them.”

  “Fascinating,” said Raffles.

  “Unfortunately,” said Monsieur Kash, “the young ballerina seemed more fascinated by our regular diners. Accustomed as she was to the airy, twinkle-toed companionship of ballet persons, she seemed to feel herself out of place among solid, serious citizens dining substantially. She gazed around at them, I was told, with a kind of aloof wonder—and her husband noticed her inattention to his culinary discourse. He flushed with anger.”