Scandal at High Chimneys Read Free Page B

and her husband’s face had altered in an almost terrifying way.
    “You were in Victor’s company last night? For how long?”
    “Well, sir, between six in the evening and about two o’clock in the morning.”
    “You are sure of that, Mr. Strickland? You are very sure?”
    Clive had reason to be sure, and said so. Matthew Damon turned to his wife.
    “Then it was not a prank,” he declared, “and our visitor could not have been Victor. I should have trusted my instinct, madam. I should have paid a visit to that detective.”
    “Come, now!’ thought Clive Strickland. ‘What precisely is happening here?’
    But he had no chance to consider it.
    Already the bell was ringing for the imminent departure of the train. Hortense, Mrs. Damon’s maid, slipped down with a graceful curtsey and hastened towards a second-class carriage at the rear. Clive found himself sitting in the corner seat against musty-smelling upholstery, his back to the engine and his portmanteau beside him, facing Georgette Damon with her husband at her right-hand side.
    A guard with flag and whistle moved past outside, locking each compartment-door and taking away the key. The whistle blew soon afterwards.
    There were cries and squeals of alarm from inside third-class carriages without glass in their windows. Amid fire-glare from the locomotive, with a chug and thud of steam shuddering through ten carriages of three compartments each, the great driving-wheels gripped and the train began to move.
    ‘Gently!’ thought Clive.
    He was born in this railway age. He had no qualms about being locked up here, shut away beyond escape or communication with another compartment, in a train hurtling along at fifty miles an hour.
    But the different looks on the faces of his companions, so far as he could see them in thick gloom, disturbed him not a little.
    “Mr. Strickland,” said Matthew Damon, in a harsh and troubled voice, “you will permit me to pursue this matter a little further. You are not moved, I hope, by any misguided sense of loyalty to my son? You are not shielding him?”
    “Great Scott, no! Shielding him from what?”
    “Be good enough, young man, to answer my question.”
    Wrath touched Clive, who sat up as straight as the other man.
    “Then state your question, Mr. Damon.”
    “How did you and Victor employ last evening?”
    “There’s very little to tell.”
    There was very little, at least, that Clive cared to tell. Victor had dined with him at Bryce’s Club, where Victor got tolerably drunk. There would have been no harm in mentioning this; Victor’s father was addicted to brandy-and-soda and encouraged the old customs. But Victor, though always amiable in liquor, had made his usual announcement that he was going out to find female company of a more than dubious sort.
    To have let him go out on his own would have been unthinkable. A man who strayed one step beyond the bright gaslight round the Regent Circus and the top of the Haymarket, especially alone and fuddled, might be set on for his money and beaten within an ace of death. Clive, himself none too sober but an able hand in a fight, had accompanied Victor to look after him.
    But he couldn’t tell this to the old man.
    They had visited the Argyll Rooms, where there was dancing, though they did not encounter Tress. They looked in at three or four night-haunts, garish boozing-dens of mirrors and plush in which the best-dressed sirens strolled provocatively and champagne cost as much as twenty-five shillings a bottle.
    “Victor,” Clive had kept insisting, “what’s wrong at High Chimneys?”
    “Can’t tell you, old boy.”
    “Then what’s the danger to your sisters?”
    “My goo’ friend!” Victor said emotionally, and wept and collapsed.
    Clive bundled him into a cab, drove home with him, and carried him upstairs to Victor’s rooms near Portman Square. In the sitting-room, lighting a candle, he had first seen the painting.
    It was a portrait in oils, of a girl’s head