Patricia Wentworth: The Girl in the Cellar

‘Why did they let him go round alone? That’s not usual, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t. I asked them the same thing, and they said he was such a nice gentleman… Yes, yes, I know-it’s a clear case of do first and think afterwards. There are people like that, you know. What they suggest seems all right at the time. It’s only afterwards that it strikes you as peculiar. And Mr Marsh who runs the place was away sick. The second string, Mr Dowding, is a nice old boy-not accustomed to taking responsibility, I should say. The house had hung on their hands. It’s been left to two sisters who are very particular, and Mr Marsh is tired of sending people to see it. Mr Dowding was thrilled at the chance of letting it while his partner was away.’ Frank shrugged his shoulders.

Jim said impatiently, ‘Yes, I know. I saw him.’ He paused, and came out with, ‘What do we do now?’

Anne woke up. It was early morning-very early. For a moment she did not know where she was, and then it came back to her. First of all, where she was. It was all accustomed and familiar. She was Anne Forest, and she had lived here since she was a little girl. She had lived here with Aunt Letty- Aunt Letty Forest.

She remembered.

She remembered Aunt Letty bringing her to the house for the first time. It was a very dim memory that came and went. There was a big black dog. She could see his curled shining coat, but she couldn’t remember his name. They played together on a grass lawn behind the house, and Aunt Letty came and called her in to tea. She remembered the currant buns, how good they tasted. After that there was a long stretch when she didn’t remember anything at all, or only little bits. Aunt Letty was there all the time. Sometimes there were battles between them. One she remembered very distinctly. It was a hot, bright day in summer. It was hot and bright, but there must have been rain, because all along one side of the road there were little pools and puddles. And as she walked Anne trod in the puddles and splashed. It was lovely, but Aunt Letty didn’t think so. Aunt Letty said, ‘Stop at once, you naughty child!’ How funny to remember a thing like that after all these years. Aunt Letty was gone-three years ago. It was three years since Anne had stood at the door and waited for the cab to come and take her away-three years since Aunt Letty’s funeral-three years since she was twenty-one. Dear Aunt Letty-dear, dear Aunt Letty. The loss of her came as fresh as if she had died yesterday instead of three years ago.

The tears came fresh to her eyelids as she thought of that last day. She had gone out, and when she was half-way to the village she found that she had left her purse and she turned back. Then, when she was close among the bushes in the front of the house, she had heard the sound. She had heard it, but she didn’t know what it was. There was a crash and a fall. She had to describe them over and over again, and she couldn’t get nearer than that. But when she came round the house, there was Aunt Letty fallen down by the back door with a terrible wound in her head. She wasn’t quite dead, but she died before the doctor came, and she died without recovering consciousness.

Anne lay there and remembered. There was no clue-nothing at all. Someone had killed Aunt Letty. Someone had struck her a smashing blow and made off through the woods. There was nothing to say who it was.

The house was left to Anne. Nobody wanted to take it, because of the murder. Everyone said that Anne couldn’t stay there. She didn’t want to stay there. She wanted to go away as far as possible and never see the place again. At least she thought that that was what she wanted. She went away.

She went right away, round the world with her friend Mavis Enderby. It was curious that all the time of being away seemed so dim. They had gone round the world and turned to come home through America. Try as she would, she couldn’t remember all that as she remembered the little bits and pieces of her childhood. And then Mavis had fallen in love with a chance-met stranger and had married him-just like that. And Anne had said she couldn’t think how anyone could do such a thing, but it was all right for Mavis if she wanted to. She didn’t know how she could, but it was her life, and she had nothing against Bill, who was nice but no different from hundreds of other men whom they had met.

What makes you fall in love with one and not with another? What had made her fall in love with Jim and he with her? They had both met dozens of other people. There was everything to stop them, and yet they had both gone down drowning deep.

She sat up and looked around the room. It was her own room. In the early morning light it had a shabby, familiar look. She got out of bed and went to the window. The trees had grown. They had not been cut or pruned, and they crowded upon one another. Her room looked to the back of the house. There used to be a gap between the two end cherry trees, and you could see right down the hill to Swan Eaton. Now there was no gap. The trees closed it in. You couldn’t see the village, or any habitation.

For the first time since she had awakened Anne began to feel afraid. She didn’t know what she was afraid of, but fear came silting over her and she drew back from the window as if the fear were outside in the garden among the trees.

But that was nonsense. Nonsense or not, she went right back from the window until she touched the bed and sat down on it, shaking a little. She was remembering-that was why she was afraid. She had landed from the States and gone to London. She hadn’t written to say she was coming. That is to say, she hadn’t given any exact date. She had been away for nearly three years, and she had waited to see Mavis married, and then she had come. There wasn’t anyone very near-some cousins whom she had never seen much of. She remembered arriving in London on a dark rainy evening. She remembered going to an hotel. And she couldn’t remember anything more than that. It seemed very far away and vague, but she did remember getting to the hotel in the evening and being very tired. And after that nothing-nothing at all until she was standing half-way down those cellar steps and knowing that there was a girl’s dead body at their foot. She didn’t strain to remember. Perhaps it would come back. It was no good straining. There was a gap in her mind. She couldn’t fill it up by trying, but at least she knew who she was now.

There was a clock on the mantelpiece. She looked up for it as if she expected it to be there. Someone must have wound it. It said half-past six. She tried the door and found it locked. Her clothes were here, and there was water in the jug on the washstand. She washed, dressed, and felt more ready to face things.

There were the two men here-her cousin Ross Cranston and the other man whose name she didn’t know. She wasn’t really afraid of Ross. He had come and gone, always rather unsatisfactory and a trouble to Aunt Letty, but she had never thought of him as someone to be afraid of. It was the other man who made her feel as if a cold finger touched her spine. She didn’t know his name. She only knew that he was evil, and that she stood in his way. What happens to you when you stand in the way of an evil person?

She made herself look at the answer to that.

Anne went on remembering. It was here a little and there a little. Then, suddenly, something that made sense of a lot of things. She sat in her bedroom, and in her mind she went round the house. Every time she did this she remembered something fresh. You couldn’t push your memories, they just came. And they came in the funniest way. It was when she was going up the attic stair in her mind that she remembered why she had gone to the London hotel, and its name, the Hood.