John Carr - Till Death Do Us Part

He had meant nothing by this, he was merely flinging out words at random, but to his surprise Cynthia's voice changed.

'As a matter of fact, Dick, I did see something.' ' What?'

Cynthia's fingers plucked at the quilted coverlet of the bed.

' I meant to tell you earlier. But we were in such an awful flap that it completely slipped my mind. It's not important, anyway, because Sir Harvey Gilman killed himself.' Her eyes moved up.' Didn't he ?'

' Never mind! What did you see ?'

' I saw somebody running,' answered Cynthia.

'When? Where?'

Cynthia reflected.' It was a minute or so before the rifle was fired at the window.'

' Before the rifle was fired at the window ?' .

'Yes. I was coming along the lane from the east, you remember? Whereas you were coming from the west? I hadn't seen you yet, and naturally I couldn't tell there was anything wrong. But I saw somebody dodge across the lane in front of me.'

' Dodge across the lane in front of you ?'

'That's right. From the fruit-orchard beside the cottage, across to the wall opposite and over the wall into the coppice.'

' Could you see who the person was ?' ' No. Only a shadow. It was that queer funny light just at sunrise.'

'Any description at all ?' ' No, I'm afraid not.' 'Man or woman?'

Cynthia hesitated. 'I can't say, really. And now, Mr Richard Markham, if you've quite finished your interrogation and your various suspicions of me, I think I'd better go home.'

' Yes, of course. Steady on! You're still groggy. I'll take you home.'

'You'll do nothing of the kind, Mr Richard Markham,' said Cynthia, with a cold concentration of anger which kept her voice at a steady level ' If you think I'm going to walk along the High Street looking as though - well, as though heaven knows what! - and if you think you're going to take me home to my parents in this state, all I can say is you're very much mistaken. Please keep away from me.'

'Don't be a fool, Cynthia!'

' So now,' said Cynthia,' I'm a fool.'

' I didn't mean that, exactly. I meant...'

' It’s not as though you showed any concern about me to begin with. Oh, no. All you could think about was her. That's very proper, I'm sure; I'm not in the least blaming you for it; but when you first call me a liar and then a fool, and only think of showing any scrap of concern for me when you realize how it may look in public, then I must really ask you to excuse me.'

Dick walked forward to expostulate. He took her by the arms, with something in his mind between kindly reasoning and an impulse to shake her until her teeth rattled. Then, he could never afterwards remember how, Cynthia was in his arms, very warm and tight-holding so that he could feel the firm muscles of her body, crying against his shoulder.

And this was the exact moment when Mrs Rackley walked in with the tea-tray.

"Thanks awfully, Dick,' murmured Cynthia, disengaging herself and giving him her friendly smile. "Thank you too, Mrs Rackley. You're not to see me home. I shall be quite all right Good-bye.'

Then she was gone.

Though Mrs Rackley did not actually say, ‘Well' her eyebrows expressed much. She creaked over and put down the tea-tray with something of a bang on the bedside-table.

' Mrs Rackley,' said Dick,' where has she got to ?'

'May I ask, sir,' inquired Mrs Rackley, keeping her eye carefully away from him, 'who you're referring to?'

' Miss Lesley, of course.'

'If you'll excuse the liberty, sir, I was just a-wondering whether it mattered to you where she'd got to.'

'For the love of Mike, Mrs Rackley, don't get the wrong impression of any thing you saw!'

'For Miss Lesley's sake, sir, I did not see it. That's for Miss Lesley's sake,' explained Mrs Rackley, still keeping her eye on a corner of the ceiling. 'What's past should be past, if you know what I mean; not that it's any of my business.'

'There never was anything...'

'I don't wish to 'ear,' said Mrs Rackley, 'about what is not none of my business. Isn't anybody going to drink this tea?'

' No, I'm afraid not Miss Cynthia...'

'This tea,' said Mrs Rackley, lifting up the tray about two inches and then slamming it down on the bedside table again, 'was distinctly ordered.'

'All right! All right! I’ll drink the damn tea!'

'Mr Markham,' said Mrs Rackley, 'I have always thought of you as a gentleman. Though it seems that men which is gentlemen and gentlemen which is others are not one and the same thing.'

Breathing a curse on all women, Dick held hard to his temper and set about pacifying her. The situation would have been grotesque if it had not been for his genuine worry about Lesley.

And he could submit that he had cause for worry. The open safe, the inexplicably empty safe, provided that In her concern for Cynthia, Mrs Rackley had evidently not noticed that open safe when she first came in; and it was closed, with the picture again hanging before it, at her second entrance.

But it was a dangerous cavity, an ugly gap with its secret gone, when you related it to Lesley's disappearance. A dozen possibilities, most of them melodramatic but all diabolically vivid, presented themselves to Dick Markham. Of the scenes from criminal history which occurred to him - laughable, no doubt - most lifelike was that of Mrs Pearcey playing the piano in a blood-spattered parlour while the police searched for the body of Phoebe Hogg. Dick had just decided to try a round of telephone-calls when, downstairs, the telephone rang.

Disregarding Mrs Rackley's further protests, Dick got down to the phone ahead of her. His hands were not very steady when he picked it up. Over the wire, making carbon crackle, came the unmistakable voice of Dr Fell.

'Ah!' said the doctor, clearing his throat with earthquake violence to the phone. 'I rather hoped to find you there. I'm at Ashe Hall. Can you come up here straightaway?'

' Is it about Lesley?'

'Yes.'

He gripped the telephone tightly, and muttered something like a prayer before he spoke. 'She's all right, isn't she?'

'All right?' thundered Dr Fell. 'Of course she's all right! She's sitting here in the room with me now.' 'Then what- ?’

' But we have, as a matter of fact,' pursued Dr Fell,' some rather important news. We've identified the dead man.'

CHAPTER 13

IN the northern wing on the ground floor at Ashe Hall, along a musty dark little passage carpeted with matting, was a room which Lord Ashe used as a study. Four persons were waiting here when Dick arrived.

A green-baize door muffled this room from domestic noises. Over the small cavern of the fireplace hung a portrait now so age-darkened, even where the light splashed it, that little emerged except a spindle-shanked ghost with a curious collar. A line of narrow windows, of crinkly bottle-glass with ancient rings, looked out on a walled garden which had once been a Ladies' Retiring Garden. Against these windows, pushed so that the light would fall across the left shoulder of anyone sitting there, was a big table covered with papers.

In a creaky swivel-chair at this table sat Lord Ashe, half turning out into the room.

Across from him, bolt upright, sat Lesley Grant.

Dr Fell was enthroned in a huge wooden chair, a very emperor's chair, which gave him some resemblance to Old King Cole. And with his back to the fireplace stood 'a tall military-looking man - Dick had seen him in the High Street not half an hour before - with hard eyes and a hard jaw, whistling between his teeth.

Lesley jumped to her feet.

' If you don't mind,' Lesley observed,' I shall just go out while you tell him. You can call me in afterwards. I just don't want to be here when you tell him.'

And she was smiling.

People would not, Dick was reflecting, behave as you expected them to behave.