The Red House Mystery Read Online Free

youth and freshness, perhaps, attracted
Antony; and when cigarettes had been ordered, and an address given to
which they were to be sent, he remembered that he had come across an
aunt of Beverley's once at a country-house. Beverley and he met again
a little later at a restaurant. Both of them were in evening-dress, but
they did different things with their napkins, and Antony was the more
polite of the two. However, he still liked Bill. So on one of his
holidays, when he was unemployed, he arranged an introduction through a
mutual friend. Beverley was a little inclined to be shocked when he was
reminded of their previous meetings, but his uncomfortable feeling soon
wore off, and he and Antony quickly became intimate. But Bill generally
addressed him as "Dear Madman" when he happened to write.
    Antony decided to stroll over to the Red House after lunch and call
upon his friend. Having inspected his bedroom which was not quite the
lavender-smelling country-inn bedroom of fiction, but sufficiently clean
and comfortable, he set out over the fields.
    As he came down the drive and approached the old red-brick front of the
house, there was a lazy murmur of bees in the flower-borders, a gentle
cooing of pigeons in the tops of the elms, and from distant lawns the
whir of a mowing-machine, that most restful of all country sounds....
    And in the hall a man was banging at a locked door, and shouting, "Open
the door, I say; open the door!"
    "Hallo!" said Antony in amazement.

Chapter III - Two Men and a Body
*
    Cayley looked round suddenly at the voice.
    "Can I help?" said Antony politely.
    "Something's happened," said Cayley. He was breathing quickly. "I heard
a shot—it sounded like a shot—I was in the library. A loud bang—I
didn't know what it was. And the door's locked." He rattled the handle
again, and shook it. "Open the door!" he cried. "I say, Mark, what is
it? Open the door!"
    "But he must have locked the door on purpose," said Antony. "So why
should he open it just because you ask him to?"
    Cayley looked at him in a bewildered way. Then he turned to the door
again. "We must break it in," he said, putting his shoulder to it. "Help
me."
    "Isn't there a window?"
    Cayley turned to him stupidly.
    "Window? Window?"
    "So much easier to break in a window," said Antony with a smile. He
looked very cool and collected, as he stood just inside the hall,
leaning on his stick, and thinking, no doubt, that a great deal of fuss
was being made about nothing. But then, he had not heard the shot.
    "Window—of course! What an idiot I am."
    He pushed past Antony, and began running out into the drive. Antony
followed him. They ran along the front of the house, down a path to the
left, and then to the left again over the grass, Cayley in front, the
other close behind him. Suddenly Cayley looked over his shoulder and
pulled up short.
    "Here," he said.
    They had come to the windows of the locked room, French windows which
opened on to the lawns at the back of the house. But now they were
closed. Antony couldn't help feeling a thrill of excitement as he
followed Cayley's example, and put his face close up to the glass. For
the first time he wondered if there really had been a revolver shot in
this mysterious room. It had all seemed so absurd and melodramatic from
the other side of the door. But if there had been one shot, why should
there not be two more?—at the careless fools who were pressing their
noses against the panes, and asking for it.
    "My God, can you see it?" said Cayley in a shaking voice. "Down there.
Look!"
    The next moment Antony saw it. A man was lying on the floor at the far
end of the room, his back towards them. A man? Or the body of a man?
    "Who is it?" said Antony.
    "I don't know," the other whispered.
    "Well, we'd better go and see." He considered the windows for a moment.
"I should think, if you put your weight into it, just where they join,
they'll give all right. Otherwise, we can kick the glass in."
    Without saying