She Died a Lady Read online

  SHE DIED A LADY

  Born in 1906, John Dickson Carr was an American author of Golden Age ‘British-style’ detective stories. He published his first novel, It Walks by Night, in 1930 while studying in Paris to become a barrister. Shortly thereafter he settled in his wife’s native England where he wrote prolifically, averaging four novels per year until the end of WWII. Well known as a master of the locked-room mystery, Carr created eccentric sleuths to solve apparently impossible crimes. His two most popular series detectives were Dr. Fell, who debuted in Hag’s Nook in 1933, and barrister Sir Henry Merrivale (published under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson), who first appeared in The Plague Court Murders (1934). Eventually, Carr left England and moved to South Carolina where he continued to write, publishing several more novels and contributing a regular column to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In his lifetime, Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of only two Americans ever admitted into the prestigious – but almost exclusively British – Detection Club. He died in 1977.

  SHE

  DIED A LADY

  JOHN DICKSON CARR

  Originally Published Under Pseudonym

  Carter Dickson

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2010 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  She Died a Lady © 1943 The Estate of Clarice M Carr,

  Richard H McNiven, Executor

  ISBN 978-1-78002-005-1

  SHE DIED A LADY

  ONE

  RITA WAINRIGHT was an attractive woman, and only thirty-eight. Alec, her husband, must have been twenty years older. At that dangerous phase of Rita’s mental and emotional life, she met Barry Sullivan.

  As for me, I regret to say I was the very last person who noticed what was going on.

  The family doctor is in a position at once privileged and difficult. He knows nearly everything. He can preach all kinds of sermons. But he can do this only if people come to him for advice. And he can’t discuss the matter with anybody else. A gossiping doctor is one abomination which even this age hasn’t yet inflicted on us.

  Of course, I am not very active nowadays. My son Tom – he is Dr Tom where I am Dr Luke – has taken over most of the practice. I can’t, any longer, get up in the middle of the night and drive a dozen miles over bad North Devon roads, as it is Tom’s pride and joy to do. He is the born country G.P.; he loves his work as I loved it. When Tom goes to see a patient, he gets wrapped up in the case and tells the patient all the imposing medical terms for what’s wrong with him. This impresses and pleases the patient; it inspires confidence to start with.

  ‘I’m very much afraid,’ Tom will say, in that grave way of his, ‘that we have here …’ And then out reels the Latin, yards of it at a time.

  True, a few of them insist on sticking to me. This is merely because there are still a lot of people who would rather have an indifferent elderly doctor than a good young one. When I was a young fellow, nobody would trust a doctor who didn’t have a beard. And something of that idea still exists in little communities like ours.

  Lyncombe, on the North Devon coast, is a village which has since come into terrible notoriety. It shocks and jars me to write about this even yet, but it has to be done. Lynmouth (which you probably know) is the seaside resort. Then you climb the steep hill, or take the funicular, up to Lynton on the cliffs. Farther still up the slope is Lynbridge; and then, where the road straightens out before it crosses the wastes of Exmoor, is Lyncombe.

  Alec and Rita Wainright lived in a large bungalow some distance farther on. They were isolated, four miles from anybody or anything. But Rita had a car, and didn’t seem to mind. It was a beautiful spot, if a little damp and windy: the back garden of ‘Mon Repos’ stretched to the very edge of the cliffs. Here there was a romantic promontory called Lovers’ Leap. Seventy feet below, the sea foamed in over rocks; there were strong currents and deep, evil tides.

  I liked Rita Wainright, and still like her. Under those artistic poses of hers, she was genuinely kind-hearted. Servants worshipped her. She might have been flighty and unstable, but you could feel her vitality wherever she went. And nobody could deny that she was a fine figure of a woman: glossy black hair, tawny skin, bold eyes, and a nervous intensity of manner. She wrote verses, and should have had a younger husband.

  Alec Wainright was more of a puzzle, though I knew him well and used to go out there on Saturday nights to play cards.

  At sixty, Alec had a fine brain going a little to seed like his habits and manners. He was well-to-do in his own right; he had been a professor of mathematics, and married Rita out in Canada eight years before when he had been teaching at McGill University. Shortish and thick-set, with a gentle voice and a preoccupied manner, he seemed to the younger people an odd choice for Rita. But he had – at least, before the situation grew desperate – a real twinkle of humour. He could talk entertainingly when he chose. And he was very fond of Rita; he had a passion for hanging her with diamonds.

  The trouble was that, even before all this, Alec had been drinking too much. I don’t mean that his drinking was loud or in any way objectionable. On the contrary, you hardly noticed it. Each evening he would quietly put down half a bottle of whisky, and then go quietly to bed. He drew still further into his shell; he seemed to fold together like a hedgehog. Then came the shock of the war.

  You remember that warm Sunday morning, with the September sunshine over everything, when the announcement came over the radio? I was alone in the house, in my dressing-gown. The voice, saying, ‘We are at war,’ seemed to fill every part of the house. My first thought was: ‘Well, here it is again,’ in a kind of blankness; and then: ‘Will Tom have to go?’

  For a while I sat and looked at my shoes. Laura, Tom’s mother, died while I was in the last one. They played If You Were the Only Girl in the World, and it makes my eyes sting sometimes when I hear that tune.

  I got up, put on my coat, and went out to the High Street. There was a fine show of asters in our front garden, with the chrysanthemums just budding. Harry Pierce, at the ‘Coach and Horses’ over the way, was just opening up his bar; you could hear the door scrape and bump against quiet. You could also hear the noise of a motor-car coming slowly along the street.

  Rita Wainright was driving her S.S. Jaguar, which glittered with high-lights under the sun. Rita wore some close-fitting flowered stuff, which set off her figure. She seemed to stretch lithely, like a cat, as she let in clutch and brake to stop the car. Beside her sat Alec, looking shapeless and shabby in an old suit and Panama hat. It startled me a little: he seemed old and deathly even then, though his gentle expression remained.

  ‘Well,’ Alec said flatly, ‘it’s happened.’

  I admitted it had. ‘Did you hear the speech?’

  ‘No,’ answered Rita, who seemed under a suppressed excitement of some kind. ‘Mrs Parker ran out into the road to tell us.’ The brown eyes, with their very luminous whites, were bewildered. ‘It doesn’t seem possible, does it?’

  ‘I am sick,’ said Alec gently, ‘of the stupidity of mankind.’

  ‘But it isn’t our stupidity, dear.’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t?’ asked Alec.

  Some yards down the road, a gate creaked. Molly Grange came out, with a young man I had never seen before.

  Molly is one of my favourites. At this time she was a straightforward, sensible, pretty girl in her middle twenties. She had the fair hair and blue eyes of her mother, with her father’s practicality. But most of us, certainly Rita at least, glanced first at the stranger.

  I must admit he was a fine-looking young man. His appearance struck me as vaguely
familiar until I placed it: he looked like a film star, but not offensively so. He was tall and well-built and he had a pleasant laugh. His thick hair, parted on one side, was as black and glossy as Rita’s. His features were handsome, and he had light, quizzical eyes. He was about Molly’s own age. In contrast to the drabness of our own clothes, he wore a cream-white suit which fitted him loosely, and a somewhat startling tie.

  That must have been when the spark touched the powder-train.

  Rita called: ‘Hell- o, Molly! Heard the news?’ Molly hesitated, and it was easy to guess why. Rita had recently had a violent row with Molly’s father, the Wainrights’ solicitor. But both of them ignored that.

  ‘Yes,’ said Molly. Her forehead wrinkled. ‘Pretty dreadful, isn’t it? May I present … Mrs Wainright, Professor Wainright. Mr Sullivan.’

  ‘Barry Sullivan,’ explained the newcomer. ‘Very glad to meet you.’

  ‘Mr Sullivan,’ said Molly, somewhat unnecessarily, ‘is an American.’

  ‘Are you really?’ cried Rita. ‘I’m from Canada myself.’

  ‘Is that so? What part of Canada?’

  ‘Montreal.’

  ‘Know it well!’ declared Mr Sullivan, leaning on the door of the car. But his hand slipped, and he stepped back again. Both he and Rita seemed suddenly a little rattled. Rita’s matured beauty – at thirty-eight, the best of all ages – came up like a blown flame. This boy of twenty-five annoyed me.

  All of us, perhaps, might have noticed more if we had not been so preoccupied. For myself, I completely forgot young Sullivan. Certainly it was months before I saw him again, though he spent a good deal of time with the Wainrights during the fortnight he was there.

  He was, it appeared, an actor of some promise. He lived in London, and was staying at Lyncombe on holiday. He went in bathing with Rita – both of them were fine swimmers – he played tennis with Rita; he photographed and was photographed by Rita; he walked to the Valley of Rocks with Rita. Alec liked him, or at least came partly out of torpor in the young man’s presence. I suppose there must have been gossip, especially when he came down once or twice during the winter to visit them. But I never heard any gossip.

  We were all, for our sins, rather cheerful during that winter of ’39–’40. When bad weather put an end to my visits to the Wainrights’, I lost touch with them. Tom bounded about the roads in his Ford, doing five men’s work. I sat by the fire, saw an occasional patient, and tried to take my retirement seriously. When you have a bad heart, you can’t play the jumping-jack at sixty-five. But I heard that Alec Wainright was taking the war badly.

  ‘He’s become a news-fiend,’ somebody told me. ‘And his booze bill at Spence and Minstead’s –’

  ‘How do you mean, news-fiend?’

  ‘Turns on the radio at eight o’clock. Hears the same news-bulletin at one, again at six, back at nine, and sees he doesn’t miss it again at midnight. Sits crouched up over that radio like a paralytic. What the devil’s wrong with him? What’s he got to worry about?’

  On the tenth of May, 1940, we found out.

  Those were bewildered days. Nazi tanks were loose like blackbeetles across a map. You could almost smell the smoke of destruction from the other side. We puzzled our wits as to what was wrong; in a daze we saw the fall of Paris and the collapse of all ordered things. It was as though you found that the very schoolbooks of your youth had been telling you lies. I need not describe those times. But on the twenty-second of May, with the French Channel ports already menaced, Rita Wainright rang me up.

  ‘Dr Luke,’ the pleasant contralto voice said, ‘I want to see you. Badly.’

  ‘Of course. Let’s have a hand of cards one evening, shall we?’

  ‘I mean – I want to see you professionally.’

  ‘But you’re Tom’s patient, my dear.’

  ‘I don’t care. I want to see you.’

  (Tom, I knew, never liked Rita much. It is true that she tended to dramatize everything, which is anathema to a medical man trying to discover what is wrong. Tom never allowed for this, and said that the damned woman would drive him scatty.)

  ‘Can I come and see you? Now?’

  ‘Very well, if you insist. Come by the side door to the surgery.’

  I hadn’t an idea what was wrong. When she entered, shutting the door with a firmness that made its glass panel rattle, her air was one of defiance underlaid by hysteria. Yet in a way she had never looked handsomer. There was a bloom and richness about her, a sparkle of eye and a flush of natural colour, which made Rita seem twenty-eight instead of thirty-eight. She wore white; her finger-nails were scarlet. She sat down in the old armchair, crossed her knees, and said unexpectedly:

  ‘I’ve quarrelled with my solicitor. No clergyman would do it, naturally. And I don’t know any J.P.s. You’ve got to …’

  Then Rita stopped. Her eyes seemed to shift and change as though she could not reach the proper determination. She pressed her lips together, showing mental indecision like a physical pain.

  ‘Got to what, my dear?’

  ‘You’ve got to give me something to make me sleep.’ She had changed her mind; no doubt about that. This was not her original request. But her voice rose, ‘I mean it, Dr Luke! I’ll go out of my head if you don’t!’

  ‘What seems to be the trouble?’

  ‘I can’t sleep!’

  ‘Yes; but why not go to Tom?’

  ‘Tom’s a slowcoach. And he’d only lecture me.’

  ‘Whereas I wouldn’t?’

  Rita smiled a little. It was a smile which would have turned my head thirty years ago. But it was more than that. It erased the fine lines from the corners of her brown eyes; it showed the charm and the muddle-headed good nature behind all those emotions. Then the smile faded.

  ‘Dr Luke,’ she said, ‘I’m terribly, horribly in love with Barry Sullivan. I’ve – I’ve slept with him.’

  ‘That’s no news, my dear, from the look of you.’

  This took her aback.

  ‘You mean you can tell?’

  ‘In a way. But never mind that. Go on.’

  ‘I suppose it shocks you.’

  ‘It doesn’t exactly shock me, Rita, but it worries me like the very devil. How long has this been going on? What the lawyers call intimacy, I mean.’

  ‘The – the last time was last night. Barry’s staying at our house. He came into my room.’

  No doubt about it, to say I was worried would be putting it mildly. I felt that cardiac twinge which is a bad danger-sign; so I shut my eyes and waited for a moment.

  ‘What about Alec?’

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ Rita returned promptly. Again her eyes shifted. ‘He doesn’t seem to notice anything much, nowadays. And, anyway, I doubt whether he would mind if he did know.’

  (More danger-signs.)

  ‘People notice much more than you think they do, Rita. As regards being fair to Alec …’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she cried out. It was hitting on the nerve. ‘I’m fond of Alec. It’s not a lie or a pretence: I really am fond of Alec, and I wouldn’t hurt him for the world. If he would mind, I couldn’t face it. But you don’t understand. This isn’t just an infatuation or a – a carnal thing.’

  (That, my dear, is the very reverse of true. But you probably believe you are telling the truth, so let’s leave it at that.)

  ‘It’s the real thing. It’s my whole being and my whole life. I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say Barry is a little younger than I am. That’s true, but he doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Yes. What does Mr Sullivan say to all this?’

  ‘Please don’t talk about him like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘“Mr Sullivan,”’ Rita mimicked. ‘Like a judge. He wants to go and tell Alec’

  ‘With what end? Divorce?’

  Rita drew a deep breath. She shook herself impatiently. She stared round the little surgery as though it were a prison. I think, too, that she felt it
as a prison. This was no acting or self-dramatization. A poised and reasonably intelligent woman had begun to talk, even to think, like a girl of eighteen. Rita’s fingers twisted a white handbag all the time her eyes roved.

  ‘Alec’s a Catholic,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t.’

  The strained eyes fastened on me.

  ‘He wouldn’t divorce me even if I wanted him to. But, don’t you see, that isn’t the point. It’s the thought of wounding Alec. It’s the thought of how he’d look, maybe, if I did tell him. He’s been so terribly good to me. He’s old and he hasn’t got anybody to turn to.’

  ‘Yes. There’s that.’

  ‘So I can’t just run away and leave him, divorce or no divorce. But I can’t give up Barry, either. I can’t! You don’t know what it’s like. Dr Luke! Barry hates this clandestine business as much as I do. He won’t wait for ever; and, if I put him off much longer, there’s no telling what might happen. It’s all such a mess.’ She looked at a corner of the ceiling. ‘If only Alec would die, or something like that …’

  A certain thought, which entered unbidden, turned me cold.

  ‘What,’ I asked, ‘are you intending to do?’

  ‘But that’s just it! I don’t know!’

  ‘Rita, how long have you been married?’

  ‘Eight years.’

  ‘Has this sort of thing ever happened before?’

  Round swung her eyes, grown guileless and imploring in their intensity. ‘It hasn’t, Dr Luke! I swear it hasn’t! That’s why I’m sure this is the real – well, grand passion. I’ve read about it and even written about it, but I never knew what it was like.’

  ‘Suppose you did run away with this fellow …’

  ‘I won’t do that, I tell you!’

  ‘Never mind. Suppose it. How would you live? Has he got any money?’

  ‘Not much, I’m afraid. But –’ Again Rita hesitated, on the brink of telling me something; and again, miserably, she decided against it. Her teeth fastened in her full under-lip. ‘I’m not saying it isn’t a practical consideration. But why bother about it at a time like this? It’s Alec I’m worried about. Always Alec, Alec, Alec, Alec!’