Final Curtain by Ngaio Marsh Page A

left them barely waiting, she felt, for her to shut the door before they fell to again.
    Only a solitary lamp burned in the hall, which was completely silent, and since the fire had died out very cold. While Troy climbed the stairs she felt as she had not felt before in this enormous house, that it had its own individuality. It stretched out on all sides of her, an undiscovered territory. It housed, as well as the eccentricities of the Ancreds, their deeper thoughts and the thoughts of their predecessors. When she reached the gallery, which was also dim, she felt that the drawing-room was now profoundly distant, a subterranean island. The rows of mediocre portraits and murky landscapes that she now passed had a life of their own in this half-light and seemed to be indifferently aware of her progress. Here, at last, was her own passage with the tower steps at the end. She halted for a moment before climbing them. Was it imagination, or had the door, out of sight on the half-landing above her, been softly closed? ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘somebody lives in the room below me,’ and for some reason the notion affected her unpleasantly. ‘Ridiculous!’ thought Troy, and turned on a switch at the foot of the stairs. A lamp, out of sight beyond the first spiral, brought the curved wall rather stealthily to life.
    Troy mounted briskly, hoping there would still be a fire in her white room. As she turned the spiral, she gathered up her long dress with her right hand and with her left reached out for the narrow rail.
    The rail was sticky.
    She snatched her hand away with some violence and looked at it. The palm and the under-surface were dark. Troy stood in the shadow of the inner wall, but she now moved up into light. By the single lamps she saw that the stain on her hand was red.
    Five seconds must have gone by before she realized that the stuff on her hand was paint.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Bloody Child
    A T HALF PAST TEN the following morning Troy, hung with paint boxes and carrying a roll of canvas and stretchers, made her way to the little theatre. Guided by Paul and Cedric, who carried her studio easel between them, she went down a long passage that led out of the hall, turned right at a green baize door, ‘beyond which,’ Cedric panted, ‘the Difficult Children ravage at will,’ and continued towards the rear of that tortuous house. Their journey was not without incident, for as they passed the door of what, as Troy later discovered, was a small sitting-room, it was flung open and a short plumpish man appeared, his back towards them, shouting angrily: ‘If you’ve no faith in my treatment, Sir Henry, you have an obvious remedy. I shall be glad to be relieved of the thankless task of prescribing for a damned obstinate patient and his granddaughter.’ Troy made a valiant effort to forge ahead, but was blocked by Cedric, who stopped short, holding the easel diagonally across the passage and listening with an air of the liveliest interest. ‘Now, now, keep your temper,’ rumbled the invisible Sir Henry. ‘I wash my hands of you,’ the other proclaimed. ‘No, you don’t. You keep a civil tongue in your head, Withers. You’d much better look after me and take a bit of honest criticism in the way it’s intended.’ ‘This is outrageous,’ the visitor said, but with a note of something like despair in his voice. ‘I formally relinquish the case. You will take this as final.’ There was a pause, during which Paul attempted, without success, to drag Cedric away. ‘I won’t accept it,’ Sir Henry said at last. ‘Come, now, Withers, keep your temper. You ought to understand. I’ve a great deal to try me. A great deal. Bear with an old fellow’s tantrums, won’t you? You shan’t regret it. See here, now. Shut that door and listen to me.’ Without turning, the visitor slowly shut the door.
    â€˜And now