Free Scandal at High Chimneys by John Dickson Carr

there had occurred to him a notion so grotesque that he would not even mention it to Matthew Damon. This notion, that the prowler on the stairs last night might have been a woman in man’s clothes, was too nonsensical; it belonged to the stage rather than to human life.
    And yet it had nagged at the back of his mind, turning fancies into ugly images. Now that he knew neither Kate nor Celia could have been concerned in a brutal murder, not only felt it but knew it …
    Rain drummed on the glass roof of the conservatory. Kate had moved closer, her face tense and her lips parted.
    “Well!” said Clive, and attempted a laugh that jarred against that close atmosphere. “It’s hardly necessary to prove where either of you happened to be, though it may be just as well to make certain. I confess to having had a literal bad quarter of an hour. You may remember, when I left you and your sister, your father was going to tell me….”
    “Oh!” said Kate.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “I forgot. I never thought I could forget, but I did. He was going to tell you everything. Did he tell you?”
    “Not the full story, no. But enough to … Look here, Kate: do you know what your father was going to tell me?”
    It was as though that first use of the Christian name broke a barrier between them.
    “No, I don’t!” said Kate. “I only know what Celia and I thought he was going to tell you. That has caused the whole misunderstanding; that’s why you and Celia and I were speaking at cross-purposes just before my father called you into his study. We imagined it concerned my stepmother, and that dreary beast Lord Albert Tressider, and those two meeting in London whenever they can snatch an opportunity!”
    Clive stared at her.
    Georgette and Tress? The coy, auburn-haired Mrs. Damon, with her mature charms, and Tress like a tame tiger in Dundreary whiskers?
    Whereupon, with memory returning, Clive could have cursed himself aloud as heartily as he cursed himself under his breath.
    “Don’t you remember?” cried Kate. “Cavvy did more than hint it; she said it, and you were there.”
    “Yes. I was there.”
    “It’s been going on for a long time, and almost everybody knew except my father. Celia thinks Georgette and her noble lord wanted my father to divorce her (divorce, if you please!) so that those two can marry. I don’t believe that. You catch our fine Lord Albert committing himself to marriage for anything except money!”
    Kate’s flush and brightness had again increased almost to tears.
    “But it was possible,” she said. “It was possible. Then, when you said you’d come to High Chimneys about a matter of marriage, and that my father all but had a seizure when you spoke to him of it—!”
    “Kate, you didn’t think—?”
    “No; not for long! Because you said it concerned one of us, and that this oh-so-superior gentleman wanted to marry Celia. That was more like him, I allow: he would have the rich girl for his wife, and for his mistress (do I shock you?) a woman who played boys’ parts in burlesque at the Gaiety Theatre and only raised herself to Shakespeare a few years before she married my father. Yes, that was like him! But it wasn’t like you as I remembered you.”
    “Good God, Kate, what sort of man do you take me for?”
    “I don’t know. Or, at least—”
    “Listen to me! Will you try to believe I never even dreamed there was anything at all between Tress and your stepmother? And that the person I came here to see was you?”
    “I will believe anything you tell me,” answered Kate, looking up at him and gripping her fingers together. “So please, please to tell me only what is true.”
    For the first time that night, through the glass roof of the conservatory, Clive saw the blaze of the lightning. A long peal of thunder rattled the glass with its concussion and fell in tumbling echoes down the sky.
    What happened then, perhaps, should not have happened; and yet, in another sense, it was