Originally published by Collins (London, 1930)

  This electronic edition published by Black Heath Editions, 2015

  Version 1

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter I

  THE house of Fen Court was aptly named. The marshes stretched away to right and left of it, before and behind. The old Tudor building with its three acres of lawns and gardens, stood like an island in the middle of a vast expanse of rushy fields, lakelets, drains, and water meadows. The sluggish waters of the river Lum formed the northern boundary of the little property, running down to the sea, which beat in on the low coast four miles away to the east.

  The house was moderate in size, containing three reception-rooms and six bedrooms, with the usual complement of kitchen offices. It had been a beautiful thing in its day, was indeed still lovely in the half light of evening. But time and neglect and decay had put in their devastating work. Two of the glorious chimneys had been blown down in a gale, the mellow tiles of a portion of the roof lay shattered and fallen upon the lawn at the rear. Some of the lead-lights in the windows had been starred or broken, and a profusion of lichens and obstreperous climbing-plants covered the dull red brick of the old walls.

  The garden at the back was full of the rotting relics of what had been a prosperous kitchen-garden. The grass on the lawn at the rear called loudly for the scythe, and, beyond it, forlorn gooseberry bushes extended their drab, thorny fingers.

  The front showed the informal wreck of what had once been a formal garden. There was a wild, grassy terrace, parallel with the main facade of the house, then a stone balustrade, then another terrace, divided down the middle by mossy, brick steps.

  From the end of these steps ran a path which accurately divided the garden to its boundary, a hedge. Flower-beds had been cut symmetrically in the lawns to either side; and a fountain stood in the middle of the path, which was broadened out at that point to pass by it on both sides.

  There was also ornamental water.

  Fen Court stood where water was cheap. Four portions of this most common fluid formed ponds in the garden. There was a pond to each side of the path below the terrace, there was another pond on each side of the path, below the spot where the fountain stood in its island, a lichened piece of statuary bolt upright in the dry basin.

  The east coast is the paradise of the bargain-hunter, and Fen Court had gone as a bargain. It had cost some thousands of pounds to build, when building was cheap; it had sold for the sum of seven hundred and fifty, with its three acres, its diminished glory, and its four circular ponds.

  On a day late in March the owner got out of a little two-seater car, helped his companion to get down, and waved a happy hand.

  “What about it, old thing?” he asked.

  The girl with him was tall and slim and dark. She had let him help her out of the car because she knew he liked doing it, but she was as agile as he and good at most games.

  “You’ve swindled someone, Ned!” she said with conviction.

  He led her into the garden, “Think so? You may be right. Seven hundred and fifty pounds for an estate! If it had been more, I couldn’t have afforded it.

  She nodded, and approached the house, to peer in at one of the lower windows, “Wants papering,” she suggested.

  “It wants a great deal that it isn’t going to get just now,” he replied, and added, half-whimsically, half-wistfully, “like me, you know.”

  “Then you must both learn to wait,” she smiled, “I say, some of the roof’s off.”

  “I am going to live in the lower storey at first till I can get some one to join me. I can paper the drawing-room myself, also what was a morning-room. I propose to make a bedroom of the dining-room.”

  “Let me paper. I’m an awful dab at it,” she said.

  He nodded, “Perhaps that would be better. I practised a bit on my garage wall, and the brush would tangle up in the paper—spoilt the effect of the pattern rather.”

  “It would! I’ll come down every day for a week and see you through, Ned. You ought to be able to work here, it’s romantic.”

  He grinned, “That’s the idea—work. The moment my amateur paper-hanger is finished, I begin my new novel. It will start here. I always like to paint from a model. ‘The Secret of Fen Court!’ How would that do, eh?”

  “Topping,” she said, “but there seems to be a lot of water about. You would think the chap who built it would have been content with the river and the fens. But he stuck in ponds as well.”

  “Fish-ponds, perhaps,” said Ned.

  “Well, let’s see if there are any fish left. There ought to be hoary old carp.”

  “House first, garden after,” he said. “Come on. I have a fine key here; the father of all keys, I should say.”

  They hurried to the front door, and let themselves in.

  The new owner of Fen Court was a novelist. He was moderately well-known as a writer of detective fiction, and prospects justified him in buying the dilapidated old place as the nucleus of what would one day be a pretty property. He bought the house on his twenty-sixth birthday as a present to himself.

  He was a little taller than his companion, and had a healthy complexion. His eyes were blue but not light. His mouth was somewhat full, his nose straight, his chin strong but not heavy. Always he looked amused at his world, but with a quite unsubtle amusement, devoid of any cynicism.

  Nancy Johnson was decidedly pretty, very alert with kind eyes, a roguish mouth, and a nose that had just missed being retroussé. She had an income of two hundred and fifty a year, and nothing to do. That is officially. Actually she sketched a little, and acted as mentor and counsellor to half a dozen young men, of whom Ned was one. If she was romantic, she had cause to be, for most of her half dozen infant Telemachuses fell in and out of love regularly, and brought their cases to be adjudged by her.

  Ned was the only one who stared steadily at one star. She did not adjudicate upon his case, because it was, incidentally, her own. Which made the matter a delicate one.

  Ned outlined with artistic enthusiasm his various plans for the furnishing of the lower rooms. Nancy’s eye for colour, and her woman’s instinct for combining the homely with the artistic, enabled her to give him very excellent help.

  He smiled and felt happy about that. At the back of his mind lay the idea that this might one day be hers as well as his, and there was no harm in getting it harmonised with their joint tastes.

  “It’ll be a jolly old place when I’m done,” he said, as they left again by the front door. “Now, what about your immemorial carp?”

  She stood for a moment on the upper terrace against the balustrade, and admired the open view, with the high sky that seemed to tower up endlessly from the watery flats.

  “Gorgeous,” she said. “Water, water, everywhere! Beautiful in the sunlight, old thing, but apt to overdo it when the winter comes. You must keep a canoe and a punt, and you will grow web-feet, in time. But it’s lovely all the same. I like this brick flight of steps. Do you remember Hood’s ‘Plea of the Midsummer Fairies,’ or ‘The Haunted House?’”

  “I don’t,” said Ned, “I always associate poor Tom with the young man who used a wiry terrier to set a snare.”

  “Then you’ve heard the worst of Hoo
d,” she said and began to murmur:

  With shattered panes the mossy grass was starred,

  Nettles and thistles struggled for espial,

  While vagrant plants, of parasitic breed,

  Had overgrown the dial…

  He nodded, “That’s fine! I must read it—romantic, what?”

  “I never see an old house but I think of it,” said Nancy. “Now I’ve put you on the track of Hood’s unforgettable faery land, let’s go and feed the carp.”

  “I forgot the crumbs,” said Ned.

  “And I’m not sure of the carp,” said she. “They symbolise—what? I think something old and sinister, ambushed in those dear, dirty ponds. I like to think that they’re bottomless pits.”

  “I don’t—if I decide to fill them up,” he replied, taking her arm lightly, as they descended the brick steps, and turned aside across the grass. “My romance takes a dry form. I prefer dryads to nereids, and a dry toad to a slimy frog.”

  Nancy laughed, “Then you have chosen the worst place for a nest.”

  “I have to compromise,” he said, looking at her. “Some people prefer a low horizon. Here it is. Do you like it?”

  But Nancy refused to look. She did not wish yet to be subject to classification, but she was wondering if she had ever told Ned that she liked oodles of sky. Or had he merely guessed?

  The pond they were now approaching was like the others, fifteen yards across, circular in shape, bounded by a rim of closely-set stones. These stones were now mossy, slippery, damp. The pond was full, to within a foot of the flags, of muddy water, on which floated weeds, and scum, melancholy, half-rotted.

  “No place for Ophelia,” said Nancy, as she looked down, “but, like so many of us—fair at a distance getting wuss as you get nearer. No, I am not fishing, Ned! We’re whited sepulchres, and this isn’t white. That’s all the difference.”

  “I’m going to christen you Nancy Nietzsche Johnson,” he said. “Get away, you little pessimist!”

  “I’m a moving on, sir,” said Nancy, “I want to see the lower ones. On the whole, I think these will be mosquito créches in the season. Unless some unexpected prettiness discloses itself further on I am afraid I shall have to advise you to drain and fill.”

  He nodded, “I am afraid so. There’s plenty of casual water without them. But what an unimaginative brute the designer was! He’s made one exactly like t’other.”

  They were now on the edge of the lower pond on that side. Nancy was staring at the further side and her gaze was curiously tense.

  “Is that a carp or something?” she demanded, pointing.

  He followed the direction of her gesture, “Hello! A blanched carp, if it is a carp, and they do blanch. On its side too—dead as Cæsar! Must be. Our friend the John Dorey is the only fish I know that swims upside down, or downside up, with facility. But that’s camouflage. He convinces the little fish he’s a sunken paper.”

  But Nancy did not appear interested in his natural history lecture. She was staring hard, and licking her lips, which were dry.

  “I suppose it looks white against the muddy water,” she murmured, “but, old thing, it’s like—it’s faintly like a——”

  She stopped and shuddered a little. He caught the urgent note in her voice and laughed.

  “No guessing needed. We’ll just toddle round and make sure.”

  He took the lead now. Nancy was a pace to his rear, and seemed reluctant. He had noticed that fugitive resemblance, but his logic told him to scout the idea. How should such things come into his deserted ponds?

  Of course it was absurd, he told himself, and then he looked again and saw that it was absurd enough to be true. He tried to keep Nancy back, but now she was more eager, and slipped past him, and stared down into the muddy, weed-haunted water of the pool.

  “I think I’m going to be sick!” she said, in a very small voice, and very suddenly.

  Ned turned to her, grabbed her about the waist, and carried her rapidly back to the brick steps where he set her down.

  “Don’t dare to move till I come back!” he commanded. “Head between knees! Keep it down! I firmly believe it’s a poisoned pup.”

  He left her, and ran back to the lower pond. As he approached the place where Nancy had announced her plight, he nearly slipped and went into the slimy depths of the pool. Saving himself by a convulsive movement, he stepped forward two paces, and looked.

  It was a face that looked up at him out of the water, a grim, old face, with a short white beard. The rest of the body was entangled in the weeds, and was invisible in that murky medium.

  He was not prone to sickness, but he quite understood Nancy’s nausea when she caught sight of that floating face. It lay just below the surface, glimmering pallidly, the short, pointed beard tilted slightly upwards, as if its owner and wearer had tried vainly to get his mouth above water.

  He made up his mind immediately. This was his place, but what lay in it was the concern of others. No second glance was needed to tell him that the man was dead; had been dead some time. It remained to fetch those who troubled themselves with the unexplained dead. If this wasn’t a case of suicide, there was the slippery stone rim of the pond to demonstrate how easily an accident could take place. He was disgusted, as he was shocked. This was a nice sort of thing to do! Was it the Chinese or the Japanese who committed suicide on their enemy’s doorstep, to put a curse on the house? And he wasn’t even an enemy of the poor old chap who had spoiled at least one piece of ornamental water.

  He went back to Nancy, who was sitting up very straight now, and apparently quite composed once more, though her face was as pallid as a sheet of paper, and her eyes showed scared whites.

  “Looks like a suicide, my dear,” he told her, “no one hops into strange gardens for fun.”

  “Then it really is—some one?” she breathed.

  He nodded, “This is an ugly, nasty business, Nancy. But what we have to do is clear enough. I suppose the nearest policeman is at Costable?”

  She bit her lip, “I saw the constabulary notice on a cottage as we passed through.”

  “Feel fit enough to get up?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes;” she got to her feet, and he put an arm round her shoulders, and helped her back to the path above.

  “Lean on me.—That’s the ticket! You may feel groggy for a few minutes. But we’ll drive over to Costable, and the air will make you feel better. Come on.”

  They left the grounds, and he helped her into the car, tucked the rug about her tenderly, and climbed into the driving seat. After a little backing and manœuvering, he was about to drive off when a high and rather shrill voice, made him turn in his seat.

  “Welcome to Fen Court, sir!”

  A small man, rather stooped, with a weazened face, and washed-out blue eyes, had come across a marsh path, and was standing slightly to the rear of the car. Ned glanced at him with distaste.

  “Ah; thank you,” he said. “Nancy, we’ll be off now.”

  The little man came closer, his face beaming, “I’m your nearest neighbour, sir. Hench is my name, Cornelius Hench. I saw you had come last night, but I was busy. I hope——”

  But Ned had a job of necessary work to do, and he started at once with the roar of a fast revving engine.

  Nancy looked curiously back over the dickey. The little man was staring after them, his hand wavering uncertainly near his hat.

  Chapter II