John Carr - Till Death Do Us Part

' Mr Markham's house, sir,' Miller nodded towards Dick, ‘was all bright-lighted in one room. I could see it plain.'

'That's all right," said Dick. 'I went to sleep on the sofa in the study, and left the lights burning.'

'But,' continued Miller with emphasis, 'this cottage 'ere was much more than that. It was all lighted up like a Christmas tree.'

Hadley took one step round the side of the writing-table. ' What's that you're saying?'

Miller remained emphatic and dogged.

'Sir, it's true what I'm telling you. All the curtains was drawn on the windows, yes. But you could just see lights inside. And practically every room in this cottage - at least, what I could see when I rode past on my bike - had a light burning inside it.'

The open bewilderment of Cynthia Drew, who had craned round from the easy-chair; the more suave perplexity of Superintendent Hadley at this vision of a house lighted in loneliness with a drugged man inside it: both these were lost to Dick's notice in the overwhelming satisfaction which radiated from Dr Gideon Fell. Dr Fell's 'Aha!' - breathed across the room with a melodramatic gusto springing from sheer sincerity - indicated that he was very sure of himself now.

Miller cleared his throat.

'I thinks to myself, "That's all right." Because I'd heard the gentleman had been hurt, and I thinks to myself about nurses and doctors and people. And I thinks to myself,

"Shall I go in and inquire?" But I thinks to myself it's too late, and it can wait.

'But, sir,' continued Miller, raising his voice as though fearful of being interrupted, 'I did see somebody standing by the front door. It was a bit dark, I know. But it was the white blouse or sweater or whatever you call it that made me notice; and I'm pretty sure...'

Hadley stood rigid.

' White blouse ?' he repeated.

' Sir, it was Miss Lesley Grant.'

CHAPTER 17

WAS Cynthia lying? Or was Lesley? Let's face it.

Walking home through the twilight of Gallows Lane, an eerie whispering twilight where the birds bickered before going to sleep, Dick Markham tried to face it out.

It was past eight o'clock. Even if he bathed and shaved in a hurry, he would still be late for his dinner-engagement with Lesley. This seemed a minor treachery, since Lesley put such a romantic store by it. But, in the matter of a little thing like a murder, was Cynthia lying or was Lesley?

The whole damned business was too close! Too personal! Too entwined with emotion! It seemed to resolve itself into a balance of what you believed between Lesley Grant on the one hand and Cynthia Drew on the other. And the balance-weights wouldn't stay still.

One of these girls, reading the matter like that, was clear-eyed and honest, telling the truth with sincere purpose. The other hid many ugly thoughts behind a pretty face, which might wear a very different expression if you caught it off guard.

Both of these girls you know well. Both you have recently held in your arms - though Cynthia only for the purpose of consoling her, of course - and to think of such matters in connexion with either seems fantastic foolery. Yet the hypodermic needle jabbed like a cobra, fanged with poison; and somebody's hand held it, and somebody laughed.

Not that he wavered in his loyalty to Lesley. He was in love with Lesley.

But suppose, just suppose after all... ?

Nonsense! She couldn't have had any motive!

Couldn't she?

Yet, in Cynthia's case, it was almost as bad. He himself had written a good deal of learned balderdash about repressions, very useful if you wanted motives for a play or a book. But if this turned up on the doorstep, if the repressions exploded in your face, you were like a man who dabbles pleasantly in diabolism and then finds the devil really following you.

And, in either event, how had the thing been done in that locked and bolted room?

Or Fell evidently knew, though he would say nothing. Dr Fell and Hadley, in fact, had adjourned to a private conference at the back of the cottage: from which emerged much shouting and banging of fists on tables but no audible explanation. Dick had not been present. He and Cynthia had even been kept in separate rooms, eyed by the watchful Miller. But now... ?

Tramping disconsolately down the lane, Dick turned in at the gate of his own cottage. It loomed up dark ahead of him, the diamond-paned windows dusted with twilight.

Curse it all, he'd got to hurry! Lesley would be waiting. He was badly in need of a shave, he must change his rumpled clothes ...

Dick closed the front door on a dusky hall. In dimness he barged through the passage into the study, where the outlines of books and melodramatic playbills were not quite lost in shadow. He touched the light-switch by the door. He clicked it, and clicked it back again, before realizing that the switch was already down but that the lights failed to work.

That infernal shilling-in-the-slot meter again!

Mrs Bewford, the woman who "did" for him, was usually kept well supplied with shillings to feed this monster. But Dick himself had kept the lights burning all night before; the supply was exhausted, and the lights had gone out.

Groping his way across the study, Dick penetrated through the kitchen and then into the scullery: whose windows were on the east side like those of his study. By rare good luck - this seldom happens - he did manage to find a shilling among the coins in his pocket. Feeling his way blindly under the sink, he found the meter, twisted the catch as he pushed the coin through, and heard it fall inside.

And the light went on in his study.

The light went on in his study.

He was standing by the scullery-sink, raising himself from the meter and staring out through the scullery-window, when he noticed it. He saw a bright glow spring up in his own side garden, just as many hours before he had seen the glow spring up through the windows of that other sitting-room ...

The light was not switched on; but it went on. Dick Markham gripped the edges of the sink. ' Wow!' he said aloud.

He went back to the study, surveyed it, and addressed the typewriter.

'Do you want to know, old son,' he said to the typewriter, ' how to create the illusion that a light is switched on inside a locked and bolted room?'

Dick stopped abruptly.

For Major Horace Price, his sandy eyebrows raised in astonishment, was standing by the door to the front hall.

Major Price's round speckled face, with its cropped sandy moustache and light-blue eyes, assumed a tolerant look. His hearty manner conveyed that he rather expected to find a writer of sensational plays talking to his typewriter as to a friend; and that, though it mightn't be his own way, he quite understood.

'What did you say, my dear chap?' asked the major.

'Do you want to know, Major Price,' demanded Dick,

'how to create the illusion that a light Is switched on inside a locked and bolted room?'

He was not now concerned with keeping secrets. He wanted to blurt out with emphasis this particular secret.

Real interest appeared in Major Price's rather prominent eyes. After a hasty glance over his shoulder to make sure nobody was listening, the major came in and closed the study door. Dick remained engrossed and enwrapped.

' I was thinking last night,' Dick swept on,' that all three cottages in this lane have shilling-in-the-slot meters. By God, that's why he did it! That's why the lights down there were turned on and left burning half the night!'

Major Price looked fussed.

'You'd better stop a bit, my dear chap! That's why who did what?'

'Bert Miller,' said Dick, 'rode past on his bike last night and saw that all the lights down there were burning behind closed curtains.'

' Did he, my dear chap ? Well ?'