Patricia Wentworth - Vanishing Point

Well it must be done tonight. More people than Henry would have noticed that Lucy hadn’t been herself all day. When she was found in the morning, it would be just one more case of an elderly woman who couldn’t sleep and had gone beyond the safety line in the matter of a drug. Her mind began to busy itself with the details. Henry and Nicholas must be asleep. Lucy had often complained that nothing woke either of them once they were off. They must have time to be so profoundly asleep that no one would ever know that she had returned to the Dower House. No one except Lucy, and Lucy would not be in a position to tell what she had known. It would have passed with her into the silence from which there is no coming back.

The voice which she had heard in the garden whispered at the edge of consciousness and was refused. The dead could not return. They had no power to harm. You were safe from them. When Lucy was dead she would be safe from her… Time went by.

When at last she rose to her feet she was steady and resolved. Her bedroom lay beyond with a connecting door. She went through to the bathroom on the other side, a converted room with some of the furniture which had belonged to it still taking up what should have been clean, clear space. She went to the small bureau in the corner and lifted the flap. There were a number of pigeonholes behind it, all stuffed with papers-old bills, old correspondence, things she had never troubled herself to deal with. When she had cleared the second hole from the left she felt for the spring which disclosed a small inner compartment. It was empty except for just one thing-a glass bottle very nearly full of white tablets.

She put everything else back, tipped a number of the tablets into the palm of her hand, and contemplated them. They were more than twenty years old-nearer thirty. Old Dr. Lester had prescribed them for her father in his last illness. One, or at the outside two if the pain became severe. On no account more. She wondered if the drug would have kept its strength. She had never heard anything to the contrary, and she would just have to chance it. Better make the dose a stiff one-say ten tablets. She counted them out and put them into a tumbler to dissolve with a little hot water. She would need a small bottle for the liquid. After some deliberation she selected from a cupboard a three-parts empty bottle of ipecacuanha wine, washed it out carefully, and when the tablets were fully dissolved corked them up in it.

She stepped out into the passage, resolved and confident, and enough at her ease to walk back as far as Jenny’s room and try the door. If it had been open, she would have locked it again and taken the key. She had not been at all satisfied with Rosamond’s response when the matter was discussed, and she did not intend to be flouted. But the key was turned and the door fast. She passed down the passage and across the hall. And so by the side door and the dark familiar path to the Dower House.

Craig Lester kept his watch. After some reconnoitring he decided on a vantage point where an old apple tree rose among the shrubs which lay between the side of the house and the gap by which the garden could be entered from next door. In the darkness and still bare of leaf he could not know what kind of a tree it was, but Lucy Cunningham could have told him that it would have a wealth of rosy blossom in May and be weighed down with rosy apples in September.

Lydia Crewe could have told him more than that. For two hundred years there had been an orchard tree here between the houses. Then the taste in gardening changed, became more formal. Shrubs took the place of pear and cherry, apple and mulberry and quince, to suit the whim of Sophia Crewe who had brought a fortune into the family’s already depleted coffers. She was beautiful, stubborn, and extremely well dowered, and Jonathan Crewe had let her have her way. But he would not part with the tree which provided his breakfast apple for ten months in the year. He had boasted about it for too long, and his middle-aged foot came down and stayed that way. He had been gone for a long time now-and Sophia and her dowry-but the apple tree remained. It had low spreading boughs. When Craig was tired of standing he could sit comfortably enough, and when he was tired of sitting he could stand again. What he could not do was to walk about. He found it remarkably like old times.

He began to think about Rosamond. He could not believe, he would not let himself believe, that anything could go wrong now. Whatever happened or didn’t happen tonight, they must be married as he had planned. He hoped with all his heart that nothing would happen. He supposed Miss Silver was bound to ring up the police, but somehow he didn’t see the country people rushing over in the middle of the night to arrest Henry Cunningham on the word of an elderly spinster. There would have to be a search warrant, and a search warrant meant recourse to a higher authority. Higher authority didn’t take kindly to being knocked up in the small hours. He considered there would be some weight behind the argument that if the Melbury rubies were in Henry Cunningham’s drawer they could very well stay there for a few hours longer. As to Miss Cunningham being in any danger, he felt that a good deal of scepticism could be expected.

He began to feel a good deal of scepticism himself. If he had not stood behind the panel and heard Lydia Crewe say, “Lucy knows too much,” the scepticism might have been complete. As it was, the words stuck in his throat-“Lucy knows too much.” And how did it go on-“She knows enough to ruin us.” He could tell himself that she was putting a case to Henry Cunningham, and that anyhow people said a lot of things they didn’t really mean. But the words stuck, and the voice that carried them. It occurred to him quite suddenly that he had never disliked any one as much as he disliked Lydia Crewe.

If his ears had not been trained to listen, he might not have heard her when she came. The path ran close beside his tree. If he had taken one step and stretched out a hand he could have touched her, but she went past with what was hardly a sound. The air moved, something went by. Since he knew where she must be going, he did not hurry to follow her. He had unlaced his shoes, now he slipped them off and left them hanging on the tree. He came in his stocking feet to the edge of the little courtyard as she slipped behind the bush which screened the secret door. The key turned, the door swung in, and she was gone. He could neither see nor hear these things, but he knew that they were happening.

And then Miss Silver was saying, “She has just gone in, has she not?”

“Yes.”

“She must be followed, and at once.”

The tall figure of Frank Abbott loomed up. He said in the almost soundless voice which the others were using,

“There’s a delay about the search warrant. It may be some time before it gets here.”

Miss Silver was already on her way towards the house. Frank followed her.

“My dear ma’am, we can’t just go in!”

He considers that her reply exhibits the Victorian tradition at the point where the sublime transcends the ridiculous. It is not so easy to achieve dignity without emphasis, but she achieved it.

“My dear Frank, I am on visiting terms with Miss Cunningham, and I feel no difficulty about entering her house. You and Mr. Lester will, of course, do what you feel to be right.” With which pronouncement she too stepped behind the bush and entered the passage.

Standing for a moment to listen, she could hear nothing. There was need for haste, but there was also a need for caution.

Lydia Crewe passed through the study, leaving the panel open. A small light burned in the hall. After some consideration she left it as it was and went up to the bedroom floor. If she had to make a sudden retreat it would be useful to be able to see her way. Lucy Cunningham’s door was the first on the right at the top of the stairs-Henry opposite on the left, and Nicholas at the back of the landing. She had no fear that they would wake, but if either of them did, Henry had alarmed her about Lucy and she had slipped over to see that all was well.