Crime at Christmas (14 page)

Something
? The waxworks became instinct with
terrible possibility as she stared at them. Some were merely blurred shapes—their
faces opaque oblongs or ovals. But others—illuminated from the street—were
beginning to reveal themselves in a new guise.

Queen Elizabeth,
with peaked chin and fiery hair, seemed to regard her with intelligent malice.
The countenance of Napoleon was heavy with brooding power, as though he were
willing her to submit. Cardinal Wolsey held her with a glittering eye.

Sonia
realized that she was letting herself be hypnotised by creatures of wax—so many
pounds of candles moulded to human form.

'This is
what happened to those others,' she thought. '
Nothing happened.
But I'm afraid of them. I'm
terribly afraid. . . There's only one thing to do. I must count them again.'

She knew
that she must find out whether her torch had been stolen through human agency;
but she shrank from the experiment, not knowing which she feared more—a
tangible enemy or the unknown.

As she
began to count, the chilly air inside the building seemed to throb with each
thud of her heart.

'Seventeen,
eighteen.' She was scarcely conscious of the numerals she murmured.
'Twenty-two, twenty-three.'

She
stopped. Twenty-three? If her tally were correct, there was an extra waxwork in
the Gallery.

On the
shock of the discovery came a blinding flash of light, which veined the sky
with fire. It seemed to run down the figure of Joan of Arc like a flaming
torch. By a freak of atmospherics, the storm, which had been a starved,
whimpering affair of flicker and murmur, culminated, and ended, in what was
apparently a thunderbolt.

The
explosion which followed was stunning; but Sonia scarcely noticed it, in her
terror.

The
unearthly violet glare had revealed to her a figure which she had previously
overlooked.

It was
seated in a chair, its hand supporting its peaked chin, and its pallid,
clean-shaven features nearly hidden by a familiar broad-brimmed felt hat, which—together
with the black cape—gave her the clue to its identity.

It was
Hubert Poke.

Three o 'clock.

Sonia heard
it strike, as her memory began to reproduce, with horrible fidelity, every word
of Poke's conversation on murder.

'Artistic
strangulation.' She pictured the cruel agony of life leaking—bubble by bubble,
gasp by gasp. It would be slow—for he had boasted of a method which left no
tell-tale marks.

'Another
death,' she thought dully. 'If it happens everyone will say that the Waxworks
have killed me. What a story. . . Only, I shall not write it up.'

The tramp
of feet rang out on the pavement below. It might have been the policeman on his
beat; but Sonia wanted to feel that young Wells was still faithful to his post.

She looked
up at the window, set high in the wall, and, for a moment, was tempted to
shout. But the idea was too desperate. If she failed to attract outside
attention, she would seal her own fate, for Poke would be prompted to hasten
her extinction.

'Awful to
feel he's so near, and yet I cannot reach him,' she thought. 'It makes it so
much worse.'

She
crouched there, starting and sweating at every faint sound in the darkness. The
rain, which still pattered on the sky-light, mimicked footsteps and whispers.
She remembered her dream and the nightmare spring and clutch.

It was an
omen. At any moment it would come. . .

Her fear
jolted her brain. For the first time she had a glimmer of hope.

'I didn't
see him before the flash, because he looked exactly like one of the waxworks.
Could I hide among them, too?' she wondered.

She knew
that her white coat alone revealed her position to him. Holding her breath, she
wriggled out of it, and hung it on the effigy of Charles II. In her black coat,
with her handkerchief-scarf tied over her face, burglar fashion, she hoped that
she was invisible against the sable-draped walls.

Her knees
shook as she crept from her shelter. When she had stolen a few yards, she
stopped to listen. . . In the darkness, someone was astir. She heard a soft padding
of feet, moving with the certainty of one who sees his goal.

Her coat
glimmered in her deserted corner.

In a sudden
panic, she increased her pace, straining her ears for other sounds. She had
reached the far end of the Gallery where no gleam from the window penetrated
the gloom. Blindfolded and muffled, she groped her way towards the alcoves
which held the tableaux.

Suddenly
she stopped, every nerve in her body quivering. She had heard a thud, like
rubbered soles alighting after a spring.

'He knows
now.' Swift on the trail of her thought flashed another. 'He will look for me.
Oh,
quick!'

She tried to
move, but her muscles were bound, and she stood as though rooted to the spot,
listening. It was impossible to locate the footsteps. They seemed to come from
every quarter of the Gallery. Sometimes they sounded remote, but, whenever she
drew a freer breath, a sudden creak of the boards close to where she stood made
her heart leap.

At last she
reached the limit of endurance. Unable to bear the suspense of waiting, she
moved on.

Her pursuer
followed her at a distance. He gained on her, but still withheld his spring.
She had the feeling that he held her at the end of an invisible string.

'He's
playing with me, like a cat with a mouse,' she thought.

If he had
seen her, he let her creep forward until the darkness was no longer absolute.
There were gradations in its density, so that she was able to recognize the
first alcove. Straining her eyes, she could distinguish the outlines of the bed
where the Virtuous Man made his triumphant exit from life, surrounded by a
flock of his sorrowing family and their progeny.

Slipping
inside the circle, she added one more mourner to the tableau.

The minutes
passed, but nothing happened. There seemed no sound save the tiny gong beating
inside her temples. Even the raindrops had ceased to patter on the sky-light.

Sonia began
to find the silence more deadly than noise. It was like the lull before the
storm. Question after question came rolling into her mind.

'Where is
he? What will he do next? Why doesn't he strike a light?'

As though
someone were listening-in to her thoughts, she suddenly heard a faint splutter
as of an ignited match. Or it might have been the click of an exhausted
electric torch.

With her
back turned to the room, she could see no light. She heard the half-hour
strike, with a faint wonder that she was still alive.

'What will
have happened before the next quarter?' she asked.

Presently
she began to feel the strain of her pose, which she held as rigidly as any
artist's model. For the time—if her presence were not already detected—her life
depended on her immobility.

As an
overpowering weariness began to steal over her a whisper stirred in her brain:

'The
alderman was found dead on a bed.'

The
newspaper account had not specified which especial tableau had been the scene
of the tragedy, but she could not remember another alcove which held a bed. As
she stared at the white dimness of the quilt she seemed to see it blotched with
a dark, sprawling form, writhing under the grip of long fingers.

To shut out
the suggestion of her fancy, she closed her eyes. The cold, dead air in the
alcove was sapping her exhausted vitality, so that once again she began to nod.
She dozed as she stood, rocking to and fro on her feet.

Her
surroundings grew shadowy. Sometimes she knew that she was in the alcove, but
at others she strayed momentarily over strange borders. . . She was back in the
summer, walking in a garden with young Wells. Roses and sunshine. . .

She awoke
with a start at the sound of heavy breathing. It sounded close to her—almost by
her side. The figure of a mourner kneeling by the bed seemed to change its
posture slightly.

Instantly
maddened thoughts began to flock and flutter wildly inside her brain.

'Who was
it? Was it Hubert Poke? Would history be repeated? Was she doomed also to be
strangled inside the alcove? Had Fate led her there?'

She waited,
but nothing happened. Again she had the sensation of being played with by a
master mind—dangled at the end of his invisible string.

Presently
she was emboldened to steal from the alcove, to seek another shelter. But
though she held on to the last flicker of her will, she had reached the limit
of endurance. Worn out with the violence of her emotions and physically spent
from the strain of long periods of standing, she staggered as she walked.

She
blundered round the Gallery, without any sense of direction, colliding blindly
with the groups of waxwork figures. When she reached the window her knees shook
under her and she sank to the ground—dropping immediately into a sleep of utter
exhaustion.

She awoke
with a start as the first grey gleam of dawn was stealing into the Gallery. It
fell on the row of waxworks, imparting a sickly hue to their features, as
though they were creatures stricken with plague.

It seemed
to Sonia that they were waiting for her to wake. Their peaked faces were
intelligent and their eyes held interest, as though they were keeping some
secret.

She pushed
back her hair, her brain still thick with clouded memories. Disconnected
thoughts began to stir, to slide about. . . Then suddenly her mind cleared, and
she sprang up—staring at a figure wearing a familiar black cape.

Hubert Poke
was also waiting for her to wake.

He sat in
the same chair, and in the same posture, as when she had first seen him, in the
flash of lightning. He looked as though he had never moved from his place—as
though he could not move. His face had not the appearance of flesh.

As Sonia
stared at him, with the feeling of a bird hypnotised by a snake, a doubt began
to gather in her mind. Growing bolder, she crept closer to the figure.

It was a
waxwork—a libellous representation of the actor—Kean.

Her laugh
rang joyously through the Gallery as she realized that she had passed a night
of baseless terrors, cheated by the power of imagination. In her relief she
turned impulsively to the waxworks.

'My congratulations,'
she said. 'You are my masters.'

They did
not seem entirely satisfied by her homage, for they continued to watch her with
an expression half-benevolent and half-sinister.

'Wait!'
they seemed to say.

Sonia
turned from them and opened her bag to get out her mirror and comb. There,
among a jumble of notes, letters, lipsticks and powder-compresses, she saw the
electric torch.

'Of course!'
she cried. 'I remember now, I put
it there. I was too windy to think properly. . .Well, I have my story. I'd
better get my coat.'

The Gallery
seemed smaller in the returning light. As she approached Charles Stuart, who
looked like an umpire in her white coat, she glanced down the far end of the
room, where she had groped in its shadows before the pursuit of imaginary
footsteps.

A waxwork
was lying prone on the floor. For the second time she stood and gazed down upon
a familiar black cape—a broad—brimmed conspirator's hat. Then she nerved
herself to turn the Figure so that its face was visible.

She gave a
scream. There was no mistaking the glazed eyes and ghastly grin. She was
looking down on the face of a dead man.

It was
Hubert Poke.

The shock
was too much for Sonia. She heard a singing in her ears, while a black mist
gathered before her eyes. For the First time in her life she fainted.

When she
recovered consciousness she forced herself to kneel beside the body and cover
it with its black cape. The pallid face resembled a death-mask, which revealed
only too plainly the lines of egotism and cruelty in which it had been moulded
by a gross spirit.