The Jersey Mystery (A Jules Poiret Mystery Book 31) Read online

  “It so happens,” replied his host cheerfully, “that there was no thunder or lightning in sight in the shipwrecks I know of in our family.”

  “Bien!” said Poiret, giving Haven an annoyed look, putting away his glasses, and then slowly climbing down from the chair.

  There was another silence. They could hear the continuous murmur of the sea. Then Kendrick said, in a doubtful and perhaps disappointed tone, “So you don’t think there is anything in the tales of the tower in flames?”

  “These are tales,” said Old Man Attenborough, shrugging his shoulders. “Some of them, I suppose, more true than others. Someone saw a fire hereabout, don’t you know, as he walked home along the cliffs. A young girl, keeping sheep on the uplands told her parents she saw flames hovering over Attenborough Tower. As far as I’m concerned, a damp heap of mud and stone like this confounded island seems the last place, where one would think of reaching illumination.”

  “What is that fire there?” asked Poiret with a gentle suddenness, pointing to the beach on the far side of the lagoon. The others were thrown a little off their balance, and the more imaginative Kendrick had even some difficulty in suppressing his anxiety, as they gazed at a series of three fires, sending blue smoke ascending silently into the evening air.

  Attenborough broke into a scornful laugh. “Students!” he said. “They’ve been camping there for about a week. Gentlemen, you will have want of your dinner,” and he turned to enter the house.

  But the superstition in Lord Kendrick was still in need of quenching. He asked anxiously, “I say, Captain Attenborough, what’s that strange noise I hear?”

  “Oh,” said Old Man Attenborough, laughing as he turned again, “it’s only some boat going by.”

  As he spoke, the butler, a tall man in tails, with red hair and a very long face, appeared in the doorway and told him that dinner was served.

  The dining-room was as nautical as the rest of the house, but its appearance was rather modern. There were three old sabers hanging over the fireplace, and a brown seventeenth-century map with tridents and little ships dotted above a curly sea. There were some cases with fantastical-colored South American birds, scientifically stuffed, shells from the Pacific, and several instruments so crudely crafted and strange in shape that natives might have used them either to kill their enemies or to cook them. But the strange air in the house lay more in the inhabitants than in the artifacts. Besides the Breton butler, Attenborough’s only servants were two Germans, somewhat strangely clad in tight uniforms of yellow. Haven’s playful instinct told him that the color and the little neat coat-tails of these two bipeds suggested the word “Canary,” and so by a mere pun connected them with the sea. Towards the end of the dinner they took their yellow clothes and red faces out of the room, leaving only the black clothes and wrinkled face of the butler.

  “I’m rather sorry you take all the family history so lightly,” said Kendrick to the host, “because the truth is, I’ve brought my friends here half with the idea of their helping you, as they know a good deal of uncovering hidden mysteries. Don’t you really believe in the family legend at all?”

  “I don’t believe in anything,” answered Old Man Attenborough coolly. “I’m a man of science.”

  To Lord Kendrick’s surprise, his tired detective friend, seemed to wake up at the sight of the main course, and talked natural history with his host with a flow of words and unexpected education, until the dessert and decanters were set down and the servants left. Then the young lord said, without altering his tone, “Please don’t think me impertinent, Captain Attenborough. I don’t ask for curiosity, but rather for my guidance and your convenience. Have I made a bad guess, if I say you don’t want these old legends talked of before your servants?”

  Attenborough lifted the hairless arches over his eyes and said, “Well, I don’t know where you got it, but the truth is I can’t stand these fellows, though I’ve no excuse for discharging any of them, even if I could hire other ones on this small island.”

  Haven, as coming out of a dream, struck the table with his fist. “By Jove!” he cried. “I wonder who that young woman is.”

  “I hope it’ll all end tonight,” continued Attenborough, not paying any attention to him, “when my nephew comes back safe from his ship. You look surprised, gentlemen. You won’t understand, I suppose, unless I tell you the whole story. You see, my father had two sons and no daughters. I’ve remained a bachelor, but my older brother married young, and has a son who’s become a sailor like the rest of us. Well, my father was a strange man. He combined superstition with a good deal of reason. They were always fighting in him, and after my first sea voyages, he developed a notion that if all the Attenboroughs sailed about, there would be too much risk to the blood line. If, on the other hand, we went to sea one at a time in strict order of succession to the family estate, he thought it would lower the risk of the estate ending up in the hands of the state. It was a silly notion, I thought, and I quarreled with my father pretty heartily, for I was an ambitious man and was left to the last, coming, by succession, after my own nephew.”

  “And both your father and brother,” said Lord Kendrick, very gently, “died at sea, right?”

  “Yes,” groaned Attenborough, “and by one of those brutal coincidences on which are built all the mythologies of mankind. They were both shipwrecked. My father, coming up to the coast out of the Atlantic, was washed up on the rocks. My brother’s ship was sunk, no one knows where, on a voyage home from Argentina. His body was never found. They were both perfectly natural mishaps, and lots of other people besides the Attenboroughs drown each year. Yet, it set the gossiping tongues on this island on fire. Men and women saw flaming towers everywhere. That’s why I say all will be well when my Nephew Curtis returns. The young woman he was engaged to was here today. She was in tears as usual. I asked her not to come back, till she heard from me. He’s practically sure to arrive back here some time tonight. We’ll put an end to that old superstition, when we drink this bottle of wine with him tonight.” He pointed at a bottle, breathing on the mantelpiece, stifling a yawn.

  “Congratulations, Monsieur, that is the very good wine,” said Poiret, appreciatively glancing at the bottle. Just then he spilled some of the wine in his glass on the table-cloth. “Mon Dieu!” he cried. “As you can see, Monsieur, Poiret is the very bad wine-drinker. He most sincerely begs your pardon, a thousand times.” He put down the glass with a composed face, but his hand had started at the exact moment when he became aware of a face looking in through the window just behind Captain Attenborough. It was the face of the young woman they had seen in the rowing boat, red lines gave her pretty face the look of a mask of tragedy.

  After a pause the detective spoke again in a mild manner. “Monsieur Attenborough,” he said, “would you please accord Poiret the favor to let him, and his friends, if they so like, to see the tower. It would be the highlight of the journey of Poiret to the islands.”

  Old Man Attenborough sprang to his feet and paced to and fro in front of the window, from which the face instantly vanished. “I tell you, sir, there is nothing in it,” he cried, with violence. “There is one thing I know about this matter,” and here he swung round and fixed Poiret with a face of frightful anger. “This family curse is sheer nonsense. There is no mystery in it for you to unravel at all.”

  Poiret smiled. “In that case, Monsieur,” he said, “there cannot be the objection to seeing your delightful tower.”

  “The idea is utterly ridiculous,” replied Old Man Attenborough, beating his fist on the back of his chair.

  “Please to forgive me, Monsieur,” said Poiret in his most sympathetic tone, “but it seems you are not so easy about the flaming tower as you say you are.”

  Attenborough sat down again as abruptly as he had risen. He sat quite still, and when he spoke again it was in a low voice. “You do it at your own peril,” he said. “I’m off to bed.”

  Some three hours later Lord Kendrick, Captain Have
n and the master detective were still dawdling about the garden in the dark. It began to dawn on the other two that Poiret had no intention of either leaving or going into either the tower or the house.

  “The lawn, it wants the weeding,” said he dreamily. “If Poiret could find the, how do you say, hoe, he would do it himself.”

  They followed him, Kendrick laughing and Haven protesting, but he replied with the utmost solemnity, explaining to them that one can always find something to do that is helpful to others. He did not find a hoe, but he found an old broom made of twigs, with which he began to brush the highly-manicured lawn.

  “Et maintenant,” he said with idiotic cheerfulness, suddenly slinging the broom away, “let us go and give water to the flowers.”

  With the same mixed emotions they watched him uncoil some considerable lengths of the large garden hose, saying with an air of unreasonable determination, “The red tulips before the yellow, perhaps. They look dry, the red tulips, n’est-ce pas?”

  He turned the tap on, and water shot out straight and solid like a long rod of steel.

  “I say, my dear fellow, look out,” cried Haven. “The force is cutting off the tulip’s heads.”

  Poiret stood ruefully contemplating the decapitated plants.

  “If ever the Bon Dieu gives to Poiret the long retirement,” he promised, scratching his head, “he will take the lessons in the gardening. My dear Haven, please to take the broom and you, Monsieur Kendrick, please to search for the saber, which Monsieur Attenborough threw away on the garden path.”

  “Why?” asked Haven, picking up the broom as his friend cheerfully searched for, and then excitedly picked up the sword.

  Almost as he spoke the huge figure of the hairy gardener appeared on a higher ridge of the lawn, waving a rake in the air and bellowing, “Put down the hose. Put down that hose and go inside.”

  “Monsieur, comment?” replied Poiret, making a half-turn towards the gardener, with the hose still spouting in his hand. The gardener caught the force of the cold water full in his face. He staggered, slipped and went sprawling with his clogs in the air.

  “A million apologies, Monsieur!” said Poiret.

  Suddenly he stood with his head forward for a moment as if looking or listening. Then he set off at a trot towards the tower, still trailing the hose behind him.

  “Haven, vite!” he cried.

  The tower was close, but its outline was curiously dim.

  “This lagoon mist,” said Kendrick, following his two friends with the saber high in the air, “has a strange smell.”

  “It has,” cried Haven. “Captain Attenborough was wrong, tonight. This story’s going to end in smoke.”

  As he spoke a most beautiful yellow-red light seemed to burst into blossom like a gigantic flower, but it was accompanied by a crackling and rattling noise that was like the laughter of a thousand devils.

  “My God! What is this?” cried Lord Kendrick.

  “The flaming tower,” said Poiret, and sent the water from his hose into the heart of the flames.

  “Luckily we hadn’t gone back to the yacht, yet!” exclaimed Kendrick.

  “We must prevent the fire from spreading to the house,” added Haven.

  “You may remember,” said the detective, breathing quickly, “that the dry hedges, which might carry the fire from here along the path to the house, they were cut away.”

  Lord Kendrick turned his eyes on the little man.

  Haven said rather anxiously, “Thank Goodness, we are on time and nobody is hurt.”

  “Of that Poiret, he is not sure,” observed the detective, gloomily. “When it comes to murder, this tower, it murders the people, who are somewhere else.”

  At the same time the monstrous figure of the gardener stood again on the lawn, but now waving not a rake but a sword. Behind him came the two Germans, also waving swords. In the blood-red glare, with their red faces and yellow clothes, they looked like devils carrying instruments of torture. In the darkness behind them a voice could be heard giving orders. When Poiret heard the voice, a terrible change came over his face. He remained composed, though, and never took his eyes off the flame, which had begun by spreading, but now seemed to lose the fight against the long silver spear of water. He kept his hands along the nozzle of the pipe to ensure the aim, and thought of nothing else. He gave one direction to his friends. “Do not allow them to take the water away!”

  Poiret did not turn his head to look at the fight that followed between the foes and friends of the mysterious fire. He almost felt the island shake when the courageous Captain Haven collided with the huge gardener. He merely imagined how they wrestled. He heard the fall, and his friend’s gasp of triumph as he dashed towards the Germans to help Lord Kendrick. Soon all three servants were conquered and bound. The fourth person still hovered near the house, only a shadow and a voice. He also heard the sound of the waves broken by the paddles of boats. A voice gave orders. The voices of students answered and came nearer. Full buckets were emptied into the flames, and the fire once more slightly diminished.

  Then came a cry that very nearly made him turn his head. Haven and Kendrick, now reinforced by the students, rushed after the mysterious figure by the house, and he heard from the other end of the garden the excited cries of the pursuit. Then, finding itself between the devil and the deep blue sea on every side, the figure sprang from the cliffs and disappeared with a splash into the dark water.

  “You can do no more,” said Poiret in a voice cold with pain. “The body, it has sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it wished to send someone else. All knew and wished to use the family legend.”

  “Oh, don’t talk in these parables,” cried Haven impatiently. “Please, can’t you put it simply in words of one syllable?”

  “Bien sur,” answered Poiret, with his eyes on the hose. “If both eyes shine bright, she is all right. If one eye, it winks, down she sinks.”

  The fire hissed and shrieked more and more, as it grew narrower and narrower under the flood from the pipe. Then it was gone.

  “Good evening!” they heard.

  “Curtis!” exclaimed Kendrick. “You’ve made it.”

  The man, young and dressed like a ship’s captain, looked around. “Gordon, good to see you. Where is my uncle?”

  It was silent for a moment. Poiret put down the hose and looked over the lagoon.

  “Poiret, like the young lady and Monsieur Attenborough looked through the telescope at the sea. We all saw something of interest, the ship of Monsieur Curtis Attenborough coming home. It had the different meaning to all three. To Monsieur Attenborough it means the return of his nephew, who is not only the owner of the family fortune, but also as long as he is alive, the uncle cannot return to his beloved sea. To Mademoiselle the return of Monsieur Curtis, it means the official announcement of the end of their engagement. That is why she was crying.”

  “Was my former fiancée here?”

  “But Poiret, who was that figure, who sprang into the waves?” asked Haven impatiently.

  “Poiret, he will come to that, mon ami.”

  “And what about the shipwreck?” asked Lord Kendrick.

  “What shipwreck?” asked Curtis Attenborough concerned.

  “It is enough to say that whenever this tower, made of wood, it catches fire, the light on the horizon, it looks like the twin light to the light-house on the coast.”

  “Don’t let’s gossip about my uncle. Don’t let’s talk about the reason I had to end my engagement to my fiancée,” said Curtis, frowning.

  “And that,” said Haven, “is how the father and brother died. The wicked uncle very nearly got his estate after all.”

  Poiret did not answer. Indeed, he did not have to speak as Old Man Attenborough clumsily walked out of the house, holding his head with one hand and followed by his butler, holding his arm.

  “She must’ve drugged my tea in the afternoon,” he said, as his servants cheered, happy at seeing him alive. “She just couldn�
�t accept that my nephew didn’t wish to spend the rest of his life with her.”

  “And therefore, Monsieur, she wished to murder the two birds at once, by setting alight the light tower.”

  “What’s been going on here?” asked young Attenborough.

  Poiret saw that the frustrated fire was extinguished, then refused to linger. His fatigue had fallen on him once more. He walked, followed by Haven, and did not stop, until he had reached the yacht, and they were safe round a cigar-box in the cabin of the yacht and he only started once, when Haven abruptly told him he had dropped cigar-ash on his trousers.

  “Mon Dieu!” the little man said rather wearily. “My trousers, they are ruined!”

  “I say, Poiret,” asked Haven, after his weary friend had somewhat calmed down and seemed again to doze off, “how did you know it was the young woman and not the uncle?”

  “My suspicion, it began with the chart.”

  “Do you mean Attenborough’s chart of his Caribbean Islands?” asked Haven.

  “You thought it was the chart of the Caribbean Islands,” explained Poiret. “Put the feather with a fossil and the coral and everyone, he will think it is the exhibit. Put the same feather with the ribbon and a flower and everyone, he will think it is for the hat of a lady. Put the feather with the ink-bottle, a book and the stack of writing-paper, and most, they will swear the feather, it is the quill pen.”

  “But how did you know, who to suspect?” asked Kendrick, just now entering the cabin.

  “Poiret, he did not know,” answered the detective to the surprise of the others. “Poiret, he saw the eagle, and the rabbit, and the remedy, it was for both the same, to keep the light house from catching the fire, and confuse and shipwreck the ship of Monsieur Curtis.”

  “Eagle and rabbit? The rocks? You seem to have noticed a lot as we came in,” cried Kendrick. “We thought you were rather abstracted.”

  “Poiret, he was sick of the sea,” said Poiret simply. “But the stomach, it has nothing to do with the brain.” He smiled mischievously, touching his protruding belly and closed his eyes.