Till Death Do Us Part dgf-15 Page 3

  Dick stared at the phone.

  ' Is he allowed to see anybody ?'

  'Yes. Can you come straight away ?'

  'I'll come,' said Dick, 'just as soon as I've phoned Lesley and told her it's all right She's been ringing here all evening, and she's nearly frantic'

  'I know. She's been phoning here too. But' - there was more than a shade of hesitation in the doctor's manner -' he says he'd rather you didn't.'

  'Didn't what?'

  'Didn't phone Lesley. Not just yet He'll explain what he means. In the meantime' - again the doctor hesitated - 'don't let anybody come with you, and don't tell anybody what I've just said. Do you promise that ?' 'Allright, all right!’

  ‘ On your word of honour, do you promise ?'

  ‘Yes.’

  Slowly, staring at the phone as though he hoped it might give back a secret, Dick replaced the receiver. His eyes wandered towards the diamond-paned windows. The storm had cleared away long ago: a fine night of stars showed outside, and there was a drowsy scent of wet grass and flowers to soothe bedevilled wits.

  Then he swung round, with an animal-like sense of another presence, and saw Cynthia Drew looking at him from the doorway of the study.

  'Hello, Dick,' smiled Cynthia.

  Dick Markham had sworn to himself, had sworn a mighty oath, that he wouldn't feel uncomfortable the next time he saw this girl; that he wouldn't avoid her eye; that he wouldn't experience this exasperating sense of having done something low. But he did.

  ' I knocked at the front door,' she explained, 'and couldn't seem to make anyone hear. And the door was open, so I came in. You don't mind ?'

  ' No, of course not!'

  Cynthia avoided his eye too. Conversation seemed to drop away, a dried-up gulf between them, until she decided to speak her mind.

  Cynthia was one of those healthy, straightforward girls who laugh a good deal and yet sometimes seem more complex than their flightier sisters. There could be no denying her prettiness: fair hair, blue eyes, with a fine complexion and fine teeth. She stood twisting the knob of the study door, and then - click! - you saw her make up her mind.

  It was no better for guessing not only what she would say, but exactly how she would say it. Cynthia looked straight at him. She drew a deep breath, her figure being set off by a pinkish-coloured jumper and a brown skirt above tan stockings and shoes. She walked forward, with a sort of calculated impulsiveness, and extended her hand.

  'I've heard about you and Lesley, Dick. I'm glad, and I hope you'll both be terribly happy.'

  At the same time her eyes were saying:

  'I didn't think you could do this. It doesn't really matter, of course; and you see what a good sport I'm being about it; but I hope you realize you are rather low ?'

  (Oh, hell!)

  'Thanks, Cynthia,' he answered aloud. 'We're rather happy about it ourselves.'

  Cynthia began to laugh; and immediately, as though conscious of the impropriety, checked herself.

  'What I really came about,' she went on, her colour going up in spite of herself, 'is this dreadful business about Sir Harvey Gilman.'

  'Yes.'

  'It is Sir Harvey Gilman, isn't it?' She nodded towards the windows, and continued to speak rapidly. If Cynthia had not been such a solid girl, you would have said that there was about her a flounce and brightness.' I mean, the man who moved into Colonel Pope's old cottage a few days ago, and kept so mysteriously in the background so he could play fortune-teller. It is Sir Harvey Gilman?'

  'Yes. That's right.'

  ' Dick, what happened this afternoon ?'

  'Weren't you there?'

  'No. But they say he's dying.'

  On the point of speaking, Dick checked himself.

  'They say there was an accident,' Cynthia continued. 'And Sir Harvey was shot near the heart. And Major Price and Dr Middlesworth picked him up and got him into a car and drove him down here. Poor Dick!'

  ' Why are you pitying me?'

  Cynthia pressed her hands together.

  'Lesley's a dear girl' - she spoke with such obvious and earnest sincerity that he could not doubt her - 'but- you shouldn't have given her that rifle. Really you shouldn't 1 She doesn't know how to deal with practical things. Major Price says Sir Harvey's in a coma and dying. Have you heard anything more from the doctor ?'

  'Well-no.'

  ·Everybody is dreadfully upset Mrs Middlesworth says it only goes to show we shouldn't have had a shooting-range. Mrs Price took her up rather sharply, especially as the major was in charge of it. But it does seem a pity: the padre says we collected well over a hundred pounds from the whole bazaar. And people are starting the most absurd rumours.'

  Cynthia was standing by the typewriter-desk, picking up scattered books only to put them down again, and talking breathlessly. She meant so well, Dick thought; she was so infernally straightforward and friendly and likeable. Yet one problem, the problem of Sir Harvey Gilman, scratched at his nerves as Cynthia's voice was beginning to scratch.

  'Look here, Cynthia. I'm sorry, but I've got to go out’

  'Nobody has seen Lord Ashe to ask him'what he thinks. But then we so seldom do see him, do we? By the way, why does Lord Ashe always look so oddly at poor Lesley, on the few occasions when he has seen her? Lady Ashe ...' Cynthia broke off, waking up. ‘ What did you say, Dick ?'

  ‘I've got to go out now.' 'To see Lesley? Of course!'

  'No. To see what's happening down at the other cottage. The doctor wants to speak to me.'

  Cynthia was instantly helpful. 'I'll go with you, Dick. Anything at all I can do to help -' .

  ' I tellyou, Cynthia. I've got to go alone!'

  It was as though he had hit her in the face.

  A complete swine, now. Well, let it go.

  After a brief silence Cynthia laughed: the same deprecating laugh, slurring things over, he had heard her give on a tennis-court when somebody lost his temper and flung down a racket with intent to break it. She regarded him soberly, the blue eyes concerned.

  ' You're so temperamental, Dick,' she said fondly.

  ‘I'm not temperamental, curse it! It's only...'

  'All writers are, I suppose. One expects it.' She dismissed the idiosyncrasy as a matter she did not understand.

  ' But - funny, isn't it? - one doesn't associate it with a person like you. I mean, an outdoor person, and a fine cricketer, and all that. I mean - oh, dear! There I go again! I must be pushing off.' She looked at him steadily. With colour under the blue eyes, her placid face became almost beautiful.

  'But you can count on me, old boy,' she added.

  Then she was gone.

  It was too late to apologize now. The villain of the piece waited until she had time to get well away towards the village. Then he left the house himself.

  In front of his cottage a broad country lane ran east and west, curving among trees and open fields. On one side of the lane ran the low stone wall which bounded the park of Ashe Hall; on the opposite side, set something over a hundred yards apart, were three cottages.

  The first was Dick Markham's. The second stood untenanted. The third, farthest east, had been rented furnished by their enigmatic newcomer. They were intriguing to visitors, these cottages in Gallows Lane. Each stood well back from the road, and made up in picturesqueness for its shilling-in-the slot electric meter and lack of main drainage.

  As Dick emerged into the lane, he could faintly hear the church clock to the west striking ten. The lane swam in dusky light, though it seemed less dark than the print of bright stars overhead, which you saw as though from a well. Night-scents and night-noises took on a peculiar -distinctness here. By the time Dick reached the last cottage, he was running blindly.

  Dark.

  Or almost dark.

  Across the road from the Pope cottage, a thick coppice of birch-trees pressed up close inside the boundary wall of the park. Close beside the cottage itself, bounding the lane for some distance eastward, stretched a fruit-orchard. It was
a dusky place even by day, damp and wasp-haunted. By night Dick, could see nothing of the cottage except chinks of light showing through imperfectly drawn curtains on two windows facing the road.

  He must have been heard or seen stumbling across the front garden. Dr Middlesworth opened the front door and admitted him into a modern-looking hall.

  'Listen,' the doctor began without preamble. He spoke in his customary mild tone, but he meant it. 'I can't go on with this pretence. It's not fair asking me to.'

  ' What pretence ? How badly is the old boy hurt ?'

  ' That's just the point. He's not hurt at all.'

  Dick closed the front door with a soft bang, and whirled round. '

  ' He fainted from shock,' Dr Middlesworth went on to explain, 'so of course everybody thought he was dying or dead. I couldn't be sure myself until I'd got him here and used the probe. But, unless you get a direct head or heart wound, a bullet from a .22 target-rifle isn't usually very dangerous.'

  A faint twinkle of amusement showed in the mild eyes under the lined forehead. Dr Middlesworth put up a hand and rubbed his forehead.

  'When I extracted the bullet, he woke up and yelled bloody murder. That rather surprised Major Price. The major insisted on tagging along, though I tried to keep him away.'

  'Well?'

  'All Sir Harvey's got is a flesh-wound. He didn't even lose much blood. His back will be sore for a few days; but, barring that, he's as fit as he ever was.'

  Dick took some moments to assimilate this.

  'Do you know,' he said, 'that Lesley Grant's nearly out of her mind ? She thinks she's killed him ?'

  All the amusement died out of Middlesworth's face.

  'Yes. I know.'

  ' Then what's the big idea ?'

  'When Major Price left here,' replied the doctor, evading a direct answer, ‘ Sir Harvey made him promise not to say anything. Sir Harvey intimated it would be best to circulate a report that he was in a coma and couldn't last long. Knowing the major, I rather doubt whether the secret will be kept for any length of time.'

  Some emotion had startled Hugh Middlesworth almost to volubility.

  'Anyway,' he complained, ' I can't keep it. I warned him of that. It's unprofessional. It's unethical. Besides...'

  Again, as once before that day, the doctor opened his mouth to say or suggest something, and thought better of it.

  'But I keep asking you, Doctor! Why?'

  'He wouldn't tell the major. He wouldn't tell me. Maybe he'll tell you. Come along.'

  Abruptly Middlesworth stretched out his hand and turned the knob of a door on the left-hand side of the hall, motioning Dick to precede him. It opened into a sitting-room, large though rather low of ceiling, with two front windows facing the lane. In the exact centre of the room was a big writing-table, lighted by a hanging lamp just over it. And, in an arm-chair beside this table, his back out from it so as not to touch the back of the chair, sat the fortune-teller now divested of his raiment.

  Sir Harvey Gilman's face was so grim that it swallowed up other impressions. Dick noticed that he wore pyjamas and a dressing-gown. His head, shorn of the turban, was now revealed as bald, above the sceptical eyes and sharp-pointed nose and hard sardonic mouth. He looked Dick up and down.

  'Annoyed, Mr Markham ?'

  Dick made no reply.

  'I rather imagine,' said Sir Harvey, 'that I'm the one to be annoyed.' He arched his back, winced, and shut his lips hard before opening them to continue.

  'I've proposed a little experiment. The doctor there doesn't seem to approve. But I imagine you'll approve, when you hear my reasons. No, Doctor, you may remain in the room.'

  There was a half-smoked cigar on the edge of an ashtray on the writing-table. Sir Harvey picked it up.

  'Understand me!' he pursued. 'I don't give a rap for abstract justice. I should not go a step out of my way to inform against anybody. But I am intellectually curious.

  I should like, before I die, to know the answer to one of the few problems that ever defeated my friend Gideon Fell.

  ' If you agree to help me, we may be able to set a trap. If not -' He waved the cigar, put it into his mouth, and found it dead. There was more than a little vindictiveness in his manner. 'Now about this woman, the so-called "Lesley Grant".'

  Dick found his voice.

  'Let's have it, sir. What were you starting to tell me before this thing happened ?'

  'About this woman,' pursued the other in his leisurely way. 'You're in love with her, I suppose? Or think you are?'

  ' I know I am.'

  'That's rather unfortunate,' said Sir Harvey dryly. 'Still, it has happened before.' He turned his head round to the desk-calendar on the writing-table, which registered the date as Thursday, June tenth. 'Tell me. Has she by any chance invited you to dinner at her house, one day this week or next, as a sort of celebration ?'

  'As a matter of fact, she has. Tomorrow night. But -'

  Sir Harvey looked startled.

  ' Tomorrow night, eh ?'

  What rose most clearly in Dick's mind was the image of Lesley herself, against the background of her house on the other side of Six Ashes. Lesley, with her good temper. Lesley, with her impracticality. Lesley, with her fastidiousness. Lesley, who hated ostentation in any form, and never wore lipstick or jewellery or conspicuous clothes. Yet these retiring qualities were caught together by an intensity of nature which, when she fell in love, seemed to make her utterly reckless in anything she said or did.

  All this flashed through his mind as her face rose in front of him, moulded into an image of passion and gentleness that obsessed his mind. Inexplicably, he found himself shouting.

  'I can't stand any more of this!' he said. 'What is all this nonsense? What accusation are you making? Are you trying to tell me her name isn't Lesley Grant at all?'

  'I am,' answered Sir Harvey. He lifted his eyes. 'Her real name is Jordan. She's a poisoner.'

  CHAPTER 4

  FOR a space while you might have counted ten, nobody spoke. When Dick did reply, it was as though the meaning of the words had failed to register with him. He spoke without anger, even with a certain casualness.

  'That's absurd.'

  'Why is it absurd?'

  'That little girl?'

  ' That little girl, as you call her, is forty-one years old.'

  There was a chair at Dick's elbow. He sat down in the chair. Colonel Pope, the owner of this cottage, had turned the sitting-room into a place of shabby and slippered comfort. Pipe-smoke had tinged grey the white-plaster walls, and seasoned the oak beams. Round the walls ran a single line of military prints from the early and middle nineteenth century, their colours of battle and uniform softened by time yet still vivid. Dick looked at these pictures, and the colours grew blurred.

  'You don't believe me,’ said Sir Harvey calmly. 'I didn't expect you to. But I've phoned London. There'll be a man down from Scotland Yard to-morrow who knows her well. There'll also be photographs and fingerprints.'

  'Wait a minute 1 Please 1'

  ' Yes, young fellow ?'

  'What, according to you, is Lesley supposed to have done?'

  'She poisoned three men. Two of them were her husbands; that's where she gets her money. The third...' 'What husbands?'

  'Does it shock your romantic soul?' inquired Sir Harvey. 'Her first husband was an American corporation lawyer named Burton Foster. Her second was a Liverpool cotton-broker called Davies; I forget his first name. Both were wealthy men. But the third victim, as I was saying...'

  Dick Markham pressed his hands to his temples.

  'God!' he said. And out of that monosyllable suddenly burst all the incredulousness, all the protest, all the dazed bewilderment which welled up. inside him. He wanted not to have heard; he wanted to blot the last thirty seconds out of his life.

  Sir Harvey had the grace to look a little fussed, and to turn his eye away.

  ' I'm sorry, young fellow' - he flung his dead cigar into the ashtray - 'but there it is.'
Then he eyed Dick keenly. 'And if you're thinking...'

  'Go on! What was I thinking?'

  The other's mouth grew still more sardonic.

  'You write psychological tosh about the minds of murderers. I enjoy the stuff; I don't mind admitting it. And among my colleagues I am supposed to have rather a peculiar sense of humour. If you think I am inventing things and playing an elaborate joke on you, by way of poetic justice, get the idea out of your head. My purpose, believe me, is not a joke.'

  And, as Dick found out only too soon, it wasn't.

  'This woman,' said Sir Harvey clearly, 'is a thoroughgoing bad hat. The sooner you get used to that idea the sooner you'll get over it. And the safer you'll be.'

  'Safer?'

  'That's what I said.' The ugly stamp appeared again on Sir Harvey's forehead. He twisted his body in the chair, to get a more comfortable position; then, stung with pain, he subsided angrily.

  'But that's the trouble,' he went on.' In my estimation, this woman isn't even particularly clever. Yet she goes on, and on, and on, and gets away with it! She's devised a method of murder that beats Gideon Fell as much as it beats me.'

  This was the first time that the flat word 'murder' had been applied to Lesley. It opened new chasms and new doors into evil rooms. Dick was still groping blindly.

  'Stop a bit!' he insisted. 'A minute ago you said something about fingerprints. You mean she's been on trial ?'

  'No. The fingerprints were obtained unofficially. She's never been on trial.'

  ' Oh ? Then how do you know she's guilty ?'

  Exasperation sharpened the other's countenance.

  ' Won't you believe me, Mr Markham, until our friend arrives from Scotland Yard ?'

  'I didn't say that. I ask why you state it as a fact. If Lesley was guilty, why didn't the police arrest her ?'

  'Because they couldn't prove it. Three occasions, mind you! And still they couldn't prove it.'

  Once more the Home Office pathologist thoughtlessly tried to move his position. Once more pain burnt him. But he was absorbed now. He hardly noticed it. His fingers lifted up and down on the padded arms of the chair. His monkey-bright eyes, fixed on Dick Markham, held so richly sardonic an expression that it might have been one of admiration.