Patricia Wentworth - Through The Wall

Penny had the strangest feeling, a sense that she was going to be asked something important. And of course what nonsense! Because what could Miss Silver possibly want her to do that would matter twopence one way or the other? It was dreadfully silly to think it could, and dreadfully silly to find her voice shaking as she said,

“Oh-yes-what is it?”

Miss Silver’s air of kind concern persisted, but it was backed up by a certain firmness.

“It may sound strange to you, my dear, but I hope you will do what I ask.”

Penny said, “What is it?” again, and this time her voice didn’t shake, because she held it steady.

“I want you to turn back the key of the door between the houses on the bedroom floor.”

Penny said very slowly and stiffly, “The door is bolted on the other side.”

Miss Silver coughed and said, “Yes.”

Penny’s eyes were fixed on her-wide brown eyes the colour of peat-water.

“You mean-you might want-to come through?”

“There is no need to look too far ahead. Constable Wilkins is spending the night on our side of the house. He will be on the bedroom landing. Without anticipating any need for his help, I should prefer to feel that there was a possibility of access.”

Penny did not ask her what she meant. She kept that wide, fixed gaze and said,

“I don’t know-if I ought to-”

“I think so.”

“Very well.”

Miss Silver said, “Go and do it now, my dear.”

Unspoken between them was the thought that there would at this moment be no one on the bedroom floor.

They stepped out into the garden. The smell of the wallflower came up. The fruit trees against the wall were shedding their blossom. The sea showed blue and calm. Miss Silver, looking round upon the scene, admired its beauty and remarked that it reminded her of Lord Tennyson’s description of the island-valley of Avilion-“fair with orchard lawns, and bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea.” After which she proceeded along the flagged path to Eliza’s kitchen door and Penny went back into her own side of the house.

As she passed the drawing-room, Felix struck a soft full chord. She hesitated for a moment, and then turned the handle slowly and stood there looking in. He was at the piano, leaning forward and scribbling on one of the tossed pages which littered the polished top. His pencil drove furiously. His face was turned in her direction, but he did not see her. He had gone through into his own country, and as far as Cove House and its problems were concerned he had ceased to be aware of it or of them.

Penny watched him for a little while. Then she closed the door and went away.

She went up on to the bedroom landing and along the little bit of passage which led to the dividing wall between the houses. When she came to the door she turned back the key, and left it there and came away.

By a quarter past ten the ground floor on Marian Brand’s side of the house had been deserted by everyone except Constable Wilkins, who had orders from Eliza to stay where he was in the kitchen until the ladies were ready for bed, and then Mr. Cunningham would let him know and he would go up and sit on the landing. As by this time he was a good deal more frightened of Eliza than he was of Crisp and the Chief Constable put together, he said, “Yes, Miss Cotton,” and remained where he was in a very amenable manner, whereupon she departed to her attic, where she locked the door and wedged a chair under the handle in approved country fashion.

It was dusk outside, but not quite dark. In the house it was dark enough. As Miss Silver crossed the landing she stood by the bathroom door for a moment and heard on her right the sound of voices coming from the room which Ina Felton was sharing with Marian Brand. On her left Ina’s own room lay dark and empty. She turned the handle gently and went in. The window was shut, but the curtains had not been drawn. She could see a pale breadth of sky.

She went over to the window, opened the right half of the casement, and leaned out. On one side the two windows of Marian’s room showed chinks of light. On the other, beyond the dividing wall between the houses, everything was dark. The drawing-room windows had been shut. The occasional sounds from the piano had ceased. There was no light in Cassy Remington’s room, nor in the one beyond it, which had been Helen Adrian’s and was now Penny Halliday’s again. The evening was very warm, and the windows of both these rooms were open. Miss Silver closed and latched the casement which she had opened and returned across the landing to her own room. She did not put the light on, but went over to the window and looked out.

The ground floor of the next-door house was dark on this side, as it had been on the other. Over the parlour she could see that Felix Brand’s window was open and the room quite dark. But in the room next to hers, which was Florence Brand’s, just on the other side of the dividing wall, though the casement window stood wide, there was a light behind the chintz curtains, throwing up a rather heavy pattern of red and purple rhododendrons. Miss Silver had not been in the house for two days without hearing all about those curtains. There had been good thick ones with linings, ageing a little in ’39, when of course owing to the outbreak of war it had not been possible to replace them. Seven years later, when they actually fell to pieces, the best that could be achieved was a chintz, and linings were not to be thought of.

As she leaned from the window and became aware of voices from behind the rhododendrons she reflected that this was indeed a fortunate circumstance. Lined damask curtains such as had once obscured the light and prevented the air from entering Mrs. Brand’s room would have had a sadly deadening effect upon sound. As a gentle-woman, Miss Silver would not have dreamed of listening to a private conversation. As a private investigator, she had often conceived it her duty to do so. She was very near that open window. The chintz, although so darkly patterned, presented hardly any obstacle to sound. The voices were those of Mrs. Alfred Brand and her sister. Miss Silver conceived it her duty to listen.

She was not the only person to do so. Penny was the last to come upstairs. Since Eliza had moved over to the other side of the house it was she who made a round of the downstairs rooms to make sure that the doors were locked and the windows latched. She picked up the Some Chapters of my Life from where it had once more slipped to the floor, plumped up the cushions and straightened the chairs in the parlour, and then passed on to the drawing-room. Felix, of course, had forgotten to shut the garden door. It stood wide, and the warm air came in with that peculiar sweetness which is never felt by day.

She latched the door and stood for a moment looking at the scrawled, untidy sheets with which the piano top was strewn. The room was full of Felix. He might have been standing there beside her. She came away no more than a minute or two before Miss Silver looked out of Ina Felton’s window and found the drawing-room dark.

Penny had finished her round. She went upstairs. The landing was dark. A streak of light on the far side showed that Florence Brand was in her room with the door ajar, and the moment Penny heard Cassy Remington’s voice it wasn’t hard to guess why Aunt Cassy never could shut a door properly. She kept tight hold of the handle and turned it, and went on keeping hold of it so that it turned back again when she let go. It was one of a lot of little things which had always made it difficult to be fond of Aunt Cassy however hard you tried, and it exasperated Felix to swearing-point. But then, of course, it wasn’t at all difficult to do that.

The light-switch was over by the bedroom door. It ought, of course, to have been at the head of the stairs, but Florence Brand’s motto was, and always had been, “Put it near me and it will be quite convenient for everyone.” There had been raging rows about that light-switch. Penny remembered them quite well in the year before the war when Martin Brand made up his mind to link up with the grid and have electric light put in. It still shook her a little to remember them-rows do something really horrid to children. In the end Florence Brand got her own way. The switch was on the wall just outside her door. It was on the wall not six inches away from where the strip of light showed at the door’s edge.