The Longer Bodies by Gladys Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page B

arms.
    â€˜Good night,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I knew what you mean. What’s queer about the house tonight?’
    â€˜It’s all right,’ muttered Clive. ‘Tell you more in the morning. Good night. Keep your door locked.’
    He turned and walked away. Celia stood at her bedroom door listening intently. Suddenly she heard a cry and a crash.
    â€˜Silly ass,’ she thought, running towards the head of the stairs. ‘He’s tripped on the corner of the eiderdown and fallen downstairs.’
    Candles and electric torches soon lighted up the scene. They issued from every bedroom door except that of Great-aunt Puddequet. Priscilla, awakened by the noise and finding Celia gone, came running out to the head of the stairs.
    Clive lay at the foot of them. He was completely entangled in a thick and handsome eiderdown quilt of a rich shade of orange. It had broken his fall. Save for a bump on the head and a bruised shin, he was none the worse. He had a strange tale to tell. As he had trodden on the first stair to descend to the hall, someone had given him a hearty push in the small of the back. Burdened with the eiderdown quilt, he had been unable to offer any resistance to the unexpected pressure from behind, and had rolled from top to bottom of the staircase.
    â€˜It’s all very well for you fellows to look like that,’ he concluded, when he had told the tale to the other athletes in the gymnasium before breakfast next morning, ‘but some very funny things went on in the house last night. To begin with, somebody frightened Priscilla out of her room. I stayed in the library reading until after half-past twelve last night. I’d forgotten that the gate between the sunk garden and the sports ground is locked at half-past eleven, so that I couldn’t get back to my hut without a lot of trouble, so I let myself out by the front door (which of course I had to unbolt first) and shut it behind me. It was not until I had walked down the steps that I remembered about the gate. Still, it struck me I could probably climb over, but, just as I got to the bottom of the steps and was making my way to the gate, I was just in time to see a jolly queer bit of business. Somebody came out of the front door. Couldn’t see me because of the darkness of the sunk garden under the shadow of the wall, but I could spot him because he showed up like Indian ink in the moonlight against the white wall of the house. He walked along the terrace and began coming down the steps. All at once, just as I was going to hail him, for of course I recognized his walk, something struck me as being rather queer. For a second I couldn’t quite work out what was wrong. Then I knew. The chap was coming down those stone steps without a sound.
    â€˜He stopped when he was about halfway down and turned round. In the bedroom immediately above the steps a candle was burning. I saw his arm go up and I heard the crack of a stone hitting a window. No sooner had he flung the stone than he bolted up the steps again as fast as ever he could go. At the same instant the window opened and a girl’s voice called out:
    â€˜â€œWho’s there?”
    â€˜At the same minute, or pretty nearly so, the candle went out. Too much draught, I suppose. Well, I thought it was a funny thing to do, to go heaving bricks at girls’ bedroom windows at about one o’clock in the morning and scaring them to death, but, still, I didn’t see what I could do except chase the fellow and point out what a poor sort of fool I thought he was. So I was just going to hop it up the steps when I’m blowed if there wasn’t a sound of wheels on the cinder track just outside the garden door where I was standing, and, do you know, it sounded for all the world like the old lady’s bathchair doing a record sprint round the ground. Couldn’t have been, I suppose, but it gave me quite a jar.
    â€˜Anyway, I took to the steps