Also available in Vintage Murder Mysteries

MARGERY ALLINGHAM

The Fashion in Shrouds

‘A rare and precious talent’

Washington Post

First, there is a skeleton in a dinner jacket. Then a corpse in a golden aeroplane. After another body, private detective Albert Campion nearly makes a fourth…

Both the skeleton and the corpse have died with suspicious convenience for Georgia Wells, a monstrous but charming actress with a raffish entourage. Georgia’s best friend just happens to be Valentine, a top couturière and Campion’s sister. In order to protect Valentine, Campion must unravel a story of blackmail and ruthless murder.

ALSO BY MARGERY ALLINGHAM IN THE ALBERT CAMPION SERIES

The Crime at Black Dudley

Mystery Mile

Look to the Lady

Police at the Funeral

Sweet Danger

Death of a Ghost

Dancers in Mourning

The Case of the Late Pig

The Fashion in Shrouds

Mr Campion and Others

Black Plumes

Traitor’s Purse

Coroner’s Pidgin

The Casebook of Mr Campion

More Work for the Undertaker

The Tiger in the Smoke

The Beckoning Lady

Hide my Eyes

The China Governess

The Mind Readers

A Cargo of Eagles

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Copyright © Margery Allingham 1929

Margery Allingham has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in Great Britain by Jarrold 1929

www.vintage-books.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099593492

To
‘THE GANG’

CHAPTER 1

Candle-Light

–

THE view from the narrow window was dreary and inexpressibly lonely. Miles of neglected park-land stretched in an unbroken plain to the horizon and the sea beyond. On all sides it was the same.

The grey-green stretches were hayed once a year, perhaps, but otherwise uncropped save by the herd of heavy-shouldered black cattle who wandered about them, their huge forms immense and grotesque in the fast-thickening twilight.

In the centre of this desolation, standing in a thousand acres of its own land, was the mansion, Black Dudley; a great grey building, bare and ugly as a fortress. No creepers hid its nakedness, and the long narrow windows were dark-curtained and uninviting.

The man in the old-fashioned bedroom turned away from the window and went on with his dressing.

‘Gloomy old place,’ he remarked to his reflection in the mirror. ‘Thank God it’s not mine.’

He tweaked his black tie deftly as he spoke, and stood back to survey the effect.

George Abbershaw, although his appearance did not indicate it, was a minor celebrity.

He was a smallish man, chubby and solemn, with a choirboy expression and a head of ridiculous bright-red curls which gave him a somewhat fantastic appearance. He was fastidiously tidy in his dress and there was an air of precision in everything he did or said which betrayed an amazingly orderly mind. Apart from this, however, there was nothing about him to suggest that he was particularly distinguished or even mildly interesting, yet in a small and exclusive circle of learned men Dr George Abbershaw was an important person.

His book on pathology, treated with special reference to fatal wounds and the means of ascertaining their probable causes, was a standard work, and in view of his many services to the police in the past his name was well known and his opinion respected at the Yard.

At the moment he was on holiday, and the unusual care which he took over his toilet suggested that he had not come down to Black Dudley solely for the sake of recuperating in the Suffolk air.

Much to his own secret surprise and perplexity, he had fallen in love.

He recognized the symptoms at once and made no attempt at self-deception, but with his usual methodical thoroughness set himself to remove the disturbing emotion by one or other of the only two methods known to mankind – disillusionment or marriage. For that reason, therefore, when Wyatt Petrie had begged him to join a week-end party at his uncle’s house in the country, he had been persuaded to accept by the promise that Margaret Oliphant should also be of the party.

Wyatt had managed it, and she was in the house.

George Abbershaw sighed, and let his thoughts run on idly about his young host. A queer chap, Wyatt: Oxford turned out a lot of interesting young men with bees in their bonnets. Wyatt was a good lad, one of the best. He was profoundly grateful to Wyatt. Good Lord, what a profile she had, and there was brain there too, not empty prettiness. If only …! He pulled himself together and mentally rebuked himself.

This problem must be attacked like any other, decently and in order.

He must talk to her; get to know her better, find out what she liked, what she thought about. With his mind still on these things the booming of the dinner gong surprised him, and he hurried down the low-stepped Tudor staircase as nearly flurried as he had ever been in his life.

However bleak and forbidding was Black Dudley’s exterior, the rooms within were none the less magnificent. Even here there were the same signs of neglect that were so evident in the Park, but there was a certain dusty majesty about the dark-panelled walls with the oil-paintings hanging in their fast-blackening frames, and in the heavy, dark-oak furniture, elaborately carved and utterly devoid of polish, that was very impressive and pleasing.

The place had not been modernized at all. There were still candles in the iron sconces in the hall, and the soft light sent great shadows, like enormous ghostly hands, creeping up to the oak-beamed ceiling.

George sniffed as he ran down the staircase. The air was faintly clammy and the tallow smelt a little.

‘Damp!’ said he to himself. ‘These old places need a lot of looking after … shouldn’t think the sanitary system was any too good. Very nice, but I’m glad it’s not mine.’

The dining-hall might have made him change his mind. All down one side of the long, low room was a row of stained-glass windows. In a great open fireplace a couple of faggots blazed whole, and on the long refectory table, which ran nearly the entire length of the flagged floor, eight seven-branched candlesticks held the only light. There were portraits on the walls, strangely differing in style, as the artists of the varying periods followed the fashions set by the masters of their time, but each face bearing a curious likeness to the next – the same straight noses, the same long thin lips, and above all, the same slightly rebellious expression.

Most of the party had already assembled when Abbershaw came in, and it struck him as incongruous to hear the babble of bright young conversation in this great tomb of a house with its faintly musty air and curiously archaic atmosphere.

As he caught sight of a gleam of copper-coloured hair on the other side of the table, however, he instantly forgot any sinister dampness or anything at all mysterious or unpleasant about the house.

Meggie Oliphant was one of those modern young women who manage to be fashionable without being ordinary in any way. She was a tall, slender youngster with a clean-cut white face, which was more interesting than pretty, and dark-brown eyes, slightly almond-shaped, which turned into slits of brilliance when she laughed. Her hair was her chief beauty, copper-coloured and very sleek; she wore it cut in a severe ‘John’ bob, a straight thick fringe across her forehead.

George Abbershaw’s prosaic mind quivered on the verge of poetry when he looked at her. To him she was exquisite. He found they were seated next to each other at table, and he blessed Wyatt for his thoughtfulness.

He glanced up the table at him now and thought what a good fellow he was.

The candle-light caught his clever, thoughtful face for an instant, and immediately the young scientist was struck by the resemblance to the portraits on the wall. There was the same straight nose, the same wide thin-lipped mouth.

Wyatt Petrie looked what he was, a scholar of the new type. There was a little careful disarrangement in his dress, his brown hair was not quite so sleek as his guests’, but he was obviously a cultured, fastidious man: every shadow on his face, every line and crease of his clothes indicated as much in a subtle and elusive way.

Abbershaw regarded him thoughtfully and, to a certain degree, affectionately. He had the admiration for him that one first-rate scholar always has for another out of his own line. Idly he reviewed the other man’s record. Head of a great public school, a First in Classics at Oxford, a recognized position as a minor poet, and above all a good fellow. He was a rich man, Abbershaw knew, but his tastes were simple and his charities many. He was a man with an urge, a man who took life, with its problems and its pleasures, very seriously. So far as the other man knew he had never betrayed the least interest in women in general or in one woman in particular. A month ago Abbershaw would have admired him for this attribute as much as for any other. Today, with Meggie at his side, he was not so sure that he did not pity him.

From the nephew, his glance passed slowly round to the uncle, Colonel Gordon Coombe, host of the week-end.

He sat at the head of the table, and Abbershaw glanced curiously at this old invalid who liked the society of young people so much that he persuaded his nephew to bring a houseful of young folk down to the gloomy old mansion at least half a dozen times a year.

He was a little man who sat huddled in his high-backed chair as if his backbone was not strong enough to support his frame upright. His crop of faded yellow hair was now almost white, and stood up like a hedge above a narrow forehead. But by far the most striking thing about him was the flesh-coloured plate with which clever doctors had repaired a war-mutilated face which must otherwise have been a horror too terrible to think upon. From where he sat, perhaps some fourteen feet away, Abbershaw could only just detect it, so skilfully was it fashioned. It was shaped roughly like a one-sided half-mask and covered almost all the top right-hand side of his face, and through it the Colonel’s grey-green eyes peered out shrewd and interested at the tableful of chattering young people.

George looked away hastily. For a moment his curiosity had overcome his sense of delicacy, and a wave of embarrassment passed over him as he realized that the little grey-green eyes had rested upon him for an instant and had found him eyeing the plate.

He turned to Meggie with a faint twinge of unwanted colour in his round cherubic face, and was a little disconcerted to find her looking at him, a hint of a smile on her lips and a curious brightness in her intelligent, dark-brown eyes. Just for a moment he had the uncomfortable impression that she was laughing at him.

He looked at her suspiciously, but she was no longer smiling, and when she spoke there was no amusement or superiority in her tone.

‘Isn’t it a marvellous house?’ she said.

He nodded.

‘Wonderful,’ he agreed. ‘Very old, I should say. But it’s very lonely,’ he added, his practical nature coming out in spite of himself. ‘Probably most inconvenient … I’m glad it’s not mine.’

The girl laughed softly.

‘Unromantic soul,’ she said.

Abbershaw looked at her and reddened and coughed and changed the conversation.

‘I say,’ he said, under the cover of the general prittle-prattle all around them, ‘do you know who everyone is? I only recognize Wyatt and young Michael Prenderby over there. Who are the others? I arrived too late to be introduced.’

The girl shook her head.

‘I don’t know many myself,’ she murmured. ‘That’s Anne Edgeware sitting next to Wyatt – she’s rather pretty, don’t you think? She’s a Stage-cum-Society person; you must have heard of her.’

Abbershaw glanced across the table, where a striking young woman in a pseudo-Victorian frock and side curls sat talking vivaciously to the young man at her side. Some of her conversation floated across the table to him. He turned away again.

‘I don’t think she’s particularly pretty,’ he said with cheerful inconsequentialness. ‘Who’s the lad?’

‘That boy with black hair talking to her? That’s Martin. I don’t know his other name, he was only introduced to me in the hall. He’s just a stray young man, I think.’ She paused and looked round the table.

‘You know Michael, you say. The little round shy girl next him is Jeanne, his fiancée; perhaps you’ve met her.’

George shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but I’ve wanted to; I take a personal interest in Michael’ – he glanced at the fair, sharp-featured young man as he spoke – ‘he’s only just qualified as an M.D., you know, but he’ll go far. Nice chap, too … Who is the young prize-fighter on the girl’s left?’

Meggie shook her sleek bronze head at him reprovingly as she followed his glance to the young giant a little higher up the table. ‘You mustn’t say that,’ she whispered. ‘He’s our star turn this party. That’s Chris Kennedy, the Cambridge rugger blue.’

‘Is it?’ said Abbershaw with growing respect. ‘Fine-looking man.’

Meggie glanced at him sharply, and again the faint smile appeared on her lips and the brightness in her dark eyes. For all his psychology, his theorizing, and the seriousness with which he took himself, there was very little of George Abbershaw’s mind that was not apparent to her, but for all that the light in her eyes was a happy one and the smile on her lips unusually tender.

‘That,’ she said suddenly, following the direction of his gaze and answering his unspoken thought, ‘that’s a lunatic.’

George turned to her gravely.

‘Really?’ he said.

She had the grace to become a little confused.

‘His name is Albert Campion,’ she said. ‘He came down in Anne Edgeware’s car, and the first thing he did when he was introduced to me was to show me a conjuring trick with a two-headed penny – he’s quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.’

Abbershaw nodded and stared covertly at the fresh-faced young man with the tow-coloured hair and the foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, and wondered where he had seen him before.

The slightly receding chin and mouth so unnecessarily full of teeth was distinctly familiar. ‘Albert Campion?’ he repeated under his breath. ‘Albert Campion? Campion? Campion?’ But still his memory would not serve him, and he gave up calling on it and once more his inquisitive glance flickered round the table.

Since the uncomfortable little moment ten minutes ago when the Colonel had observed him scrutinizing his face, he had been careful to avoid the head of the table, but now his attention was caught by a man who sat next to his host, and for an instant he stared unashamedly.

The man was a foreigner, so much was evident at a glance; but that in itself was not sufficient to interest him so particularly.

The man was an arresting type. He was white-haired, very small and delicately made, with long graceful hands which he used a great deal in his conversation, making gestures, swaying his long, pale fingers gracefully, easily.

Under the sleek white hair which waved straight back from a high forehead his face was grey, vivacious, and peculiarly wicked.

George could think of no other word to describe the thin-lipped mouth that became one-sided and O-shaped in speech, the long thin nose, and more particularly the deep-set, round, black eyes which glistened and twinkled under enormous shaggy grey brows.

George touched Meggie’s arm.

‘Who is that?’ he said.

The girl looked up and then dropped her eyes hurriedly.

‘I don’t know,’ she murmured, ‘save that his name is Gideon or something, and he is a guest of the Colonel’s – nothing to do with our crowd.’

‘Weird-looking man,’ said Abbershaw.

‘Terrible!’ she said, so softly and with such earnestness that he glanced at her sharply and found her face quite grave.

She laughed as she saw his expression.

‘I’m a fool,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize what an impression the man had made on me until I spoke. But he looks a wicked type, doesn’t he? His friend, too, is rather startling, don’t you think – the man sitting opposite to him?’

The repetition of the word ‘wicked’, the epithet which had arisen in his own mind, surprised Abbershaw, and he glanced covertly up the table again.

The man seated opposite Gideon, on the other side of the Colonel, was striking enough indeed.

He was a foreigner, grossly fat, and heavily jowled, and there was something absurdly familiar about him. Suddenly it dawned upon George what it was. The man was the living image of the little busts of Beethoven which are sold at music shops. There were the same heavy-lidded eyes, the same broad nose, and to cap it all the same shock of hair, worn long and brushed straight back from the amazingly high forehead.

‘Isn’t it queer?’ murmured Meggie’s voice at his side. ‘See – he has no expression at all.’

As soon as she had spoken George realized that it was true. Although he had been watching the man for the last few minutes he had not seen the least change in the heavy red face; not a muscle seemed to have moved, nor the eyelids to have flickered; and although he had been talking to the Colonel at the time, his lips seemed to have moved independently of the rest of his features. It was as if one watched a statue speak.

‘I think his name is Dawlish – Benjamin Dawlish,’ said the girl. ‘We were introduced just before dinner.’

Abbershaw nodded, and the conversation drifted on to other things, but all the time he was conscious of something faintly disturbing in the back of his mind, something which hung over his thoughts like a black shadow vaguely ugly and uncomfortable.

It was a new experience for him, but he recognized it immediately.

For the first time in his life he had a presentiment – a vague, unaccountable apprehension of trouble ahead.

He glanced at Meggie dubiously.

Love played all sorts of tricks with a man’s brains. It was very bewildering.

The next moment he had pulled himself together, telling himself soberly not to be a fool. But wriggle and twist as he might, always the black shadow sat behind his thoughts, and he was glad of the candle-light and the bright conversation and the laughter of the dinner-table.

CHAPTER 2

The Ritual of the Dagger

–

AFTER dinner, Abbershaw was one of the first to enter the great hall or drawing-room which, with the dining-room, took up the best part of the ground floor of the magnificent old mansion. It was an amazing room, vast as a barn and heavily panelled, with a magnificently carved fire-place at each end wherein two huge fires blazed. The floor was old oak and highly polished, and there was no covering save for two or three beautiful Shiraz rugs.

The furniture here was the same as in the other parts of the house, heavy, unpolished oak, carved and very old; and here, too, the faint atmosphere of mystery and dankness, with which the whole house was redolent, was apparent also.

Abbershaw noticed it immediately, and put it down to the fact that the light of the place came from a huge iron candle-ring which held some twenty or thirty thick wax candles suspended by an iron chain from the centre beam of the ceiling, so that there were heavy shadows round the panelled walls and in the deep corners behind the great fire-places.

By far the most striking thing in the whole room was an enormous trophy which hung over the fire-place farthest from the door. It was a vast affair composed of some twenty or thirty lances arranged in a circle, heads to the centre, and surmounted by a feathered helm and a banner resplendent with the arms of the Petries.

Yet it was the actual centre-piece which commanded immediate interest. Mounted on a crimson plaque, at the point where the lance-heads made a narrow circle, was a long, fifteenth-century Italian dagger. The hilt was an exquisite piece of workmanship, beautifully chased and encrusted at the upper end with uncut jewels, but it was not this that first struck the onlooker. The blade of the Black Dudley Dagger was its most remarkable feature. Under a foot long, it was very slender and exquisitely graceful, fashioned from steel that had in it a curious greenish tinge which lent the whole weapon an unmistakably sinister appearance. It seemed to shine out of the dark background like a living and malignant thing.

No one entering the room for the first time could fail to remark upon it; in spite of its comparatively insignificant size it dominated the whole room like an idol in a temple.

George Abbershaw was struck by it as soon as he came in, and instantly the feeling of apprehension which had annoyed his prosaic soul so much in the other room returned, and he glanced round him sharply, seeking either reassurance or confirmation, he hardly knew which.

The house-party which had seemed so large round the dinner-table now looked amazingly small in this cathedral of a room.

Colonel Coombe had been wheeled into a corner just out of the firelight by a man-servant, and the old invalid now sat smiling benignly on the group of young people in the body of the room. Gideon and the man with the expressionless face sat one on either side of him, while a grey-haired, sallow-faced man whom Abbershaw understood was a Dr White Whitby, the Colonel’s private attendant, hovered about them in nervous solicitude for his patient.

On closer inspection Gideon and the man who looked like Beethoven proved to be even more unattractive than Abbershaw had supposed from his first somewhat cursory glance.

The rest of the party was in high spirits. Anne Edgeware was illustrating the striking contrast between Victorian clothes and modern manners, and her vivacious air and somewhat outrageous conversation made her the centre of a laughing group. Wyatt Petrie stood amongst his guests, a graceful, lazy figure, and his well-modulated voice and slow laugh sounded pleasant and reassuring in the forbidding room.

It was Anne who first brought up the subject of the dagger, as someone was bound to do.

‘What a perfectly revolting thing, Wyatt,’ she said, pointing at it. ‘I’ve been trying not to mention it ever since I came in here. I should toast your muffins with something else, my dear.’

‘Ssh!’ Wyatt turned to her with mock solemnity. ‘You mustn’t speak disrespectfully of the Black Dudley Dagger. The ghosts of a hundred dead Petries will haunt you out of sheer outraged family pride if you do.’

The words were spoken lightly, and his voice had lost none of its quiet suavity, but whether it was the effect of the dagger itself or that of the ghostly old house upon the guests none could tell, but the girl’s flippancy died away and she laughed nervously.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should just loathe to be haunted. But quite seriously, then, if we mustn’t laugh, what an incredible thing that dagger is.’

The others had gathered round her, and she and Wyatt now stood in the centre of a group looking up at the trophy. Wyatt turned round to Abbershaw. ‘What do you think of it, George?’ he said.

‘Very interesting – very interesting indeed. It is very old, of course? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like it in my life.’ The little man spoke with genuine enthusiasm. ‘It’s a curio, some old family relic, I suppose?’

Wyatt nodded, and his lazy grey eyes flickered with faint amusement.

‘Well, yes, it is,’ he said. ‘My ancestors seem to have had high old times with it if family legends are true.’

‘Ah!’ said Meggie, coming forward. ‘A ghost story?’

Wyatt glanced at her.

‘Not a ghost,’ he said, ‘but a story.’

‘Let’s have it.’ It was Chris Kennedy who spoke; the young rugger blue had more resignation than enthusiasm in his tone. Old family stories were not in his line. The rest of the party was considerably more keen, however, and Wyatt was pestered for the story.

‘It’s only a yarn, of course,’ he began. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told it to anyone else before. I don’t think even my uncle knows it.’ He turned questioningly as he spoke, and the old man shook his head.

‘I know nothing about it,’ he said. ‘My late wife brought me to this house,’ he explained. ‘It had been in the family for hundreds of years. She was a Petrie – Wyatt’s aunt. He naturally knows more about the history of the house than I. I should like to hear it, Wyatt.’

Wyatt smiled and shrugged his shoulders, then, moving forward, he climbed on to one of the high oak chairs by the fire-place, stepped up from one hidden foothold in the panelling to another, and stretching out his hand lifted the shimmering dagger off its plaque and carried it back to the group who pressed round to see it more closely.

The Black Dudley Dagger lost none of its sinister appearance by being removed from its setting. It lay there in Wyatt Petrie’s long, cultured hands, the green shade in the steel blade more apparent than ever, and a red jewel in the hilt glowing in the candle-light.

‘This,’ said Wyatt, displaying it to its full advantage, ‘is properly called the “Black Dudley Ritual Dagger”. In the time of Quentin Petrie, somewhere about 1500, a distinguished guest was found murdered with this dagger sticking in his heart.’ He paused, and glanced round the circle of faces. From the corner by the fire-place Gideon was listening intently, his grey face livid with interest, and his little black eyes wide and unblinking. The man who looked like Beethoven had turned towards the speaker also, but there was no expression on his heavy red face.

Wyatt continued in his quiet voice, choosing his words carefully and speaking with a certain scholastic precision.

‘I don’t know if you know it,’ he said, ‘but earlier than that date there had been a superstition which persisted in outlying places like this that a body touched by the hands of the murderer would bleed afresh from the mortal wound; or, failing that, if the weapon with which the murder was committed were placed into the hand which struck the blow, it would become covered with blood as it had been at the time of the crime. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you, Abbershaw?’ he said, turning towards the scientist, and George Abbershaw nodded.

‘Go on,’ he said briefly.

Wyatt returned to the dagger in his hand.

‘Quentin Petrie believed in this superstition, it appears,’ he said, ‘for anyway it is recorded that on this occasion he closed the gates and summoned the entire household, the family, servants, labourers, herdsmen, and hangers-on, and the dagger was solemnly passed around. That was the beginning of it all. The ritual sprang up later – in the next generation, I think.’

‘But did it happen? Did the dagger spout blood and all that?’ Anne Edgeware spoke eagerly, her round face alive with interest.

Wyatt smiled. ‘I’m afraid one of the family was beheaded for the murder,’ he said; ‘and the chronicles have it that the dagger betrayed him, but I fancy that there was a good deal of juggling in affairs of justice in those days.’

‘Yes, but where does the ritual come in?’ said Albert Campion, in his absurd falsetto drawl. ‘It sounds most intriguing. I knew a fellow once who, when he went to bed, made a point of taking off everything else first before he removed his topper. He called that a ritual.’

‘It sounds more like a conjuring trick,’ said Abbershaw.

‘It does, doesn’t it?’ agreed the irrepressible Albert. ‘But I don’t suppose your family ritual was anything like that, was it, Petrie? Something more lurid, I expect.’

‘It was, a little, but nearly as absurd,’ said Wyatt, laughing. ‘Apparently it became a custom after that for the whole ceremony of the dagger to be repeated once a year – a sort of family rite as far as I can ascertain. That was only in the beginning, of course. In later years it degenerated into a sort of mixed hide-and-seek and relay race, played all over the house. I believe it was done at Christmas as late as my grandfather’s time. The procedure was very simple. All the lights in the house were put out, and the head of the family, a Petrie by name and blood, handed the dagger to the first person he met in the darkness. Acceptance was of course compulsory, and that person had to hunt out someone else to pass the dagger on to, and the game continued in that fashion – each person striving to get rid of the dagger as soon as it was handed to him – for twenty minutes. Then the head of the house rang the dinner gong in the hall, the servants relit the lights, and the person discovered with the dagger lost the game and paid a forfeit which varied, I believe, from kisses to silver coins all round.’

He stopped abruptly.

‘That’s all there is,’ he said, swinging the dagger in his fingers.

‘What a perfectly wonderful story!’

Anne Edgeware turned to the others as she spoke. ‘Isn’t it?’ she continued. ‘It just sort of fits in with this house!’

‘Let’s play it.’ It was the bright young man with the teeth again, and he beamed round fatuously at the company as he spoke. ‘For sixpences if you like,’ he ventured as an added inducement, as no one enthused immediately.

Anne looked at Wyatt. ‘Could we?’ she said.

‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea,’ remarked Chris Kennedy, who was willing to back up Anne in anything she chose to suggest. The rest of the party had also taken kindly to the idea, and Wyatt hesitated.

‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t,’ he said, and paused. Abbershaw was suddenly seized with a violent objection to the whole scheme. The story of the dagger ritual had impressed him strangely. He had seen the eyes of Gideon fixed upon the speaker with curious intensity, and had noticed the little huddled old man with the plate over his face harking to the barbarous story with avid enjoyment. Whether it was the great dank gloomy house or the disturbing effects of love upon his nervous system he did not know, but the idea of groping round in the dark with the malignant-looking dagger filled him with a distaste more vigorous than anything he had ever felt before. He had an impression, also, that Wyatt was not too attracted by the idea, but in the face of the unanimous enthusiasm of the rest of the party he could do nothing but fall in with the scheme.

Wyatt looked at his uncle.

‘But certainly, my dear boy, why should I?’ The old man seemed to be replying to an unspoken question. ‘Let us consider it a blessing that so innocent and pleasing an entertainment can arise from something that must at one time have been very terrible.’

Abbershaw glanced at him sharply. There had been a touch of something in the voice that did not ring quite true, something hypocritical – insincere. Colonel Coombe glanced at the men on either side of him.

‘I don’t know …’ he began dubiously.

Gideon spoke at once: it was the first time Abbershaw had heard his voice, and it struck him unpleasantly. It was deep, liquid, and curiously caressing, like the purring of a cat.

‘To take part in such an ancient ceremony would be a privilege,’ he said.

The man who had no expression bowed his head.

‘I too,’ he said, a trace of foreign accent in his voice, ‘would be delighted.’

Once the ritual had been decided upon, preparations went forward with all ceremony and youthful enthusiasm. The man-servant was called in, and his part in the proceedings explained carefully. He was to let down the great iron candle-ring, extinguish the lights, and haul it up to the ceiling again. The lights in the hall were to be put out also, and he was then to retire to the servants’ quarters and wait there until the dinner-gong sounded, at which time he was to return with some of the other servants and relight the candles with all speed.

He was a big man with a chest like a prize-fighter and a heavy florid face with enormous pale-blue eyes which had in them an innately sullen expression. A man who could become very unpleasant if the occasion arose, Abbershaw reflected inconsequentially.

As head of the family, Wyatt the last of the Petries took command of the proceedings. He had the manner, Abbershaw considered, of one who did not altogether relish his position. There was a faintly unwilling air about everything he did, a certain over-deliberation in all his instructions which betrayed, the other thought, a distaste for his task.

At length the signal was given. With a melodramatic rattle of chains the great iron candle-ring was let down and the lights put out, so that the vast hall was in darkness save for the glowing fires at each end of the room. Gideon and the man with the face like Beethoven had joined the circle round the doorway to the corridors, and the last thing George Abbershaw saw before the candles were extinguished was the little wizened figure of Colonel Coombe sitting in his chair in the shadow of the fireplace smiling out upon the scene from behind the hideous flesh-coloured plate. Then he followed the others into the dim halls and corridors of the great eerie house, and the Black Dudley Ritual began.

CHAPTER 3

In the Garage

–

THE weirdness of the great stone staircases and unlit recesses was even more disquieting than Abbershaw had imagined it would be. There were flutterings in the dark, whisperings, and hurried footsteps. He was by no means a nervous man, and in the ordinary way an experience of this sort would probably have amused him faintly, had it not bored him. But on this particular night and in this house, which had impressed him with such a curious sense of foreboding ever since he had first seen it from the drive, he was distinctly uneasy.

To make matters worse, he had entirely lost sight of Meggie. He had missed her in the first blinding rush of darkness, and so, when by chance he found himself up against a door leading into the garden, he went out, shutting it softly behind him.

It was a fine night, and although there was no moon, the starlight made it possible for him to see his way about; he did not feel like wandering about the eerie grounds alone, and suddenly it occurred to him that he would go and inspect his A.C. two-seater which he had left in the big garage beside the drive.

He was a tidy man, and since he had no clear recollection of turning off the petrol before he left her, it struck him that now was a convenient opportunity to make sure.