Till Death Do Us Part dgf-15 Page 5

'I think you'll do it Miss Lesley Grant, so-called, thinks I'm in a coma and dying. So I can't have betrayed her. Don't you begin to follow the scheme?'

  'Oh, yes. I follow if

  'She's being a fool, of course. But she must play with this bright shiny wonderful toy called murder by poison. It's got her. She's obsessed. That's why she took the risk of shooting at me, and trusting to innocent eyes and general gullibility to have it called an accident. All her preparations are made for somebody's death. And she won't be cheated of the thrill.'

  Sir Harvey tapped one finger on the edge of the writing-table.

  'You, Mr. Markham, will go to this dinner. You will do whatever she tells you, and accept whatever she tells you. I shall be in the next room, listening. With your assistance, we shall find out what she keeps in this famous hiding-place. And, when we do discover how a not-very clever lady has managed to beat the police of two nations ...'

  'Excuse me' interrupted Dr Middlesworth again.

  Both the others jumped a little.

  But Dr Middlesworth remained casual. Getting up from the basket-chair, he walked to the nearer of the two windows.

  Both were curtained in some heavy rough flowered material, now faded as well as darkened with age and tobacco-smoke. The curtains had not been quite drawn together on either window, and the nearer window was wide open. Middlesworth threw the curtains apart, so that lamplight streamed out into the front garden. Putting his head out of the window, he glanced left and right. Then he lowered the window, and stared at it for a moment - a long moment - before closing the curtains.

  ·Well?' demanded Sir Harvey. 'What is it?'

  'Nothing,' said the doctor, and returned to his chair.

  Sir Harvey studied him. 'You, Doctor,' he observed dryly,' haven't said a great deal so far.'

  'No,' agreed Middlesworth.

  'Whatdo you think about the whole thing?'

  'Well!' said the doctor, in acute discomfort He looked at the pipe, at his time-worn shoes, and then across at Dick. 'This thing is rotten for you. You hate thrashing it out in front of me, in front of an outsider, and I don't blame you.'

  "That's all right,' said Dick. He liked the doctor, and he felt a certain reliance on that mild, intelligent judgement ' What do you say ?'

  ' Frankly, I don't know what to say. You can't go on with a murderess, Dick. That's only common sense. But...'

  Middlesworth hesitated and tried a new tack.

  'This trap of Sir Harvey's may be worth trying. I think it is. Though the girl must be really insane if she tries any funny business against you only forty-eight hours after this business with the rifle. What's more, it's going to queer the whole pitch if any news leaks out that Sir Harvey isn't badly hurt. Major Price already knows, for instance.'

  Brooding, Middlesworth chewed at the stem of the pipe. Then he rose at Dick with a kind of gentle roar of reassurance.

  'This whole thing may be a mistake, even though Sir Harvey and all the police in Christendom swear it isn't There's just that possibility. But the point is, Dick... confound it, one way or the other, you've got to know.'

  'Yes. I see that'

  Dick leaned back in the chair. He felt bruised and deflated; but he was not feeling the worst yet, for the shock had not passed off. This placid sitting-room, with its military prints and its dark oak beams and its Benares brass ornaments on the mantelpiece, seemed as unreal as the history of Lesley. He pressed his hands over his eyes, wondering how the world would look in proper focus. Sir Harvey eyed him paternally.

  'Then shall we say - to-morrow evening?'

  'All right. I suppose so.'

  'You shall have your final instructions,' their host said with meaning, ' to-morrow morning. I have your word, I hope, that you will drop no word or hint of this to our nimble friend?'

  'But suppose she is guilty?' said Dick, suddenly taking his hands away from his eyes and almost shouting out the words. 'Suppose by any chance she is guilty, and this trick of yours proves it. What happens then?'

  'Frankly, I don't much care.'

  ' They're not going to arrest her. I warn you of that, even if I have to perjure myself.'

  Sir Harvey raised one eyebrow. 'You would prefer to see her continue her merry course of poisoning?'

  ' I don't give a damn what she's done!'

  'Suppose we leave that,' suggested the pathologist, 'until you see how you feel after the experiment? Believe me, you may have a considerable revulsion of feeling by this time to-morrow night. You may find yourself not quite as infatuated as you thought. Have I your word not to upset the apple-cart by saying anything to our friend?'

  'Yes. I'll do it. In the meantime..."

  'In the meantime,' interposed Dr Middlesworth, 'you're going home, and try to get some sleep. You,' he turned to Sir Harvey, 'are going to lie down. You tell me you've got some luminal with you; and you can take a quarter-grain if that back starts to hurt. I'll look in in the morning to change the dressing. For the moment, will you please sit down?'

  Sir Harvey obeyed, lowering himself gingerly into the easy-chair. He also looked a little exhausted, and wiped the sleeve of his dressing-gown across his forehead.

  'I shall not sleep,' he complained. 'Whatever I take, I shall not sleep. To find out the game at last... to discover how she can poison husbands and lovers, but nobody eke...!'

  Dick Markham, who had got up heavily and was turning towards the door, swung round again.

  'Nobody else?' he repeated. 'What exactly do you mean by that?'

  ' My dear fellow! Why do you think you were chosen ?' ' I still don't understand.'

  'Please note,' retorted Sir Harvey, 'that each victim was a man in love with or at least violently infatuated with her. Blind. Uncritical. Unreasoning. I'm theorizing now, I confess. But you surely don't think the choice was accident or coincidence? The victim had to be in that state of mind.'

  'Why so?'

  ' To do what she asked him. Naturally.'

  'Haifa moment,' protested a harassed Dr Middlesworth. He had picked up his hat and medicine-case from a side table, and was trying to shove Dick out through the door into the hall; but even he turned round now.

  'Let's be sensible about this, Sir Harvey,' he suggested. 'You can't be thinking this girl would say, "Look, here's a hypodermic full of prussic acid. Go home and inject it into your arm, will you, just to oblige me "?'

  'Not quite as crudely as that, no.'

  'Then how?'

  'We propose to find out. But if we have any clue to these sealed-room affairs, my guess is that there's the clue. It would work with an addle-headed man in a duped and bedazed state of mind. It would not work for a second with anybody else,'

  ' It wouldn't work, for instance, with you or me?'

  'Hardly,' replied their host with dry ponderousness. ' Good night, gentlemen. Many thanks!'

  And they saw him smile, his eyes now less hypnotic as at a task well accomplished, when they went out into the hall.

  Some distance away over the fields to the west, the church clock at Six Ashes was striking eleven. Its notes brushed across the veil of stillness, a tangible stillness, when Dick and Dr Middlesworth left the house. Heavy constraint held them both dumb. Going ahead with an electric torch, Middlesworth indicated his car in the lane.

  ' Climb in,' he said.' I'll drop you off at your place.'

  The same rigidity of silence obsessed them, their eyes straight ahead on the windscreen, during that very brief ride. The wheels of the car jolted in an uneven lane; Middlesworth kept on revving the motor with unnecessary violence, and he drew up outside Dick's cottage with a squeal of brakes. While the engine breathed with a carbonized, rattle, Middlesworth glanced sideways and spoke above it

  'All right?'

  'Quite all right,' said Dick, opening the car-door.

  'You're in for a bad night. Like a sleeping-tablet?'

  'No, thanks. I've got plenty of whisky.'

  'Don't get drunk.' Middlesworth's hands tightened on the steering
-wheel. 'For God's sake don't get drunk.' He hesitated. 'Look here. About Lesley. I was just thinking -'

  ' Good night, Doctor.'

  'Good night, old man.'

  The car slid into gear and moved away westwards. While its tail-light disappeared between a curve of the hedgerow on one side, and the low stone boundary wall of Ashe Hall park on the other, Dick Markham stood by the gate in the fence round his own front garden. He stood there motionless for several minutes. A sheer blackness of spirits, a blackness like an extinguisher-cap, descended on him as the noise of that motor-car faded away.

  Sir Harvey Gilman, he thought, had read his mind with profound clearness.

  As a first consideration, he wasn't thinking about murder at all. He wasn't thinking about the men Lesley was supposed to have killed. He was thinking about the men she professed to have loved before they died.

  Scattered words and phrases, sometimes whole sentences, returned to him and jostled through his head with audible vividness, as though he could hear them all at the same time.

  'That little girl, as you call her, is forty-one years old.' 'Prostration and floods of tears.' 'Slightly second-hand.' 'A gross old man.' 'Their bedroom.' 'A dreadful coincidence or mistake.' 'Don't you find this situation just a little suspicious ? Just a little unsavoury ?'

  Infantile. No doubt! Puerile. No doubt 1

  He tried to tell himself so. But this is how a person in love really does feel; and he loved Lesley, and therefore he raged. If those words had been deliberately chosen, each as a tiny knife to nick against the same nerve, they could not have had more of an effect.

  He found himself trying to create mental pictures of these men. Burton Foster, the American lawyer, he pictured as a swaggering good-natured sort of chap with a suspicious manner which could be the more easily hoodwinked. It was not difficult to imagine Mr Davies, the 'gross old man', against the background of his 'big, florid, old-fashioned house'.

  Martin Belford, the last of the three, remained more shadowy yet for some reason less disliked. Young, it appeared. Probably careless and genial. Belford didn't seem to matter so much.

  If you regarded it with half an eye of reason, to stand here disliking dead men, torturing yourself with the images of persons you had never met and now never could meet, was the height of absurdity. What should matter, what did matter, what had seemed to matter most in every criminal record, was the blatant fact of a hypodermic full of poison.

  'She can't help herself.' 'A psychic disease.' 'This girl isn't normal.' 'She won't be cheated of the thrill.' These were the words which should have come back to him first; and, with them, a vision of a stealthy flushed face beside a wall-safe.

  Facts? Oh, yes.

  He had mouthed a lot of fine words about a mistake. But in his heart of hearts Dick Markham didn't believe in a mistake. Scotland Yard didn't make mistakes like that. And yet, even so, it was the first set of Sir Harvey's phrases rather than the second which returned to jar and pierce and inflame him. If only she hadn't told him all those lies about her past life...

  But she hadn't told him any lies. She hadn't told him anything at all.

  Oh, Christ, why was everything so complicated I Dick struck his hand on the top of the gate-post. The lights of his cottage were shining up there behind him, making the dew gleam on the grass under the windows, and illuminating the crazy-paved path to the front door. Even as he started to walk towards it, he was conscious of a sense of loneliness - intense, unpleasant loneliness - as though something had been cut away from him. It startled him, because he had thought he liked loneliness. And now he was afraid of it. The cottage seemed a hollow shell, booming as he closed the front door behind him. He walked down the passage to the study, opened the door, and stopped short. On the sofa in the study sat Lesley.

  CHAPTER 6

  SHE had been absentmindedly turning over the pages of a magazine, and looked up quickly as the door opened.

  A fat-bowled lamp on the table behind the sofa brought out the smoothness of Lesley's clear skin as she raised her eyes. It shone on the soft brown hair, curling outwards at the shoulders. She had changed her white frock for one of dark green, with winking buttons.'Cette belle anglaise, très chic très distinguée’ Not a line showed in the smooth flesh of the neck. Her wide-open, innocent brown eyes looked frightened.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment Perhaps Lesley noticed the expression on his face.

  She threw aside the magazine, got up, and ran towards him.

  He kissed her - after a fashion.

  'Dick,' Lesley said quietly. 'What's wrong?'

  'Wrong?'

  ‘She stood back at arm's length to study him. The candid eyes went over his face searchingly.

  'You've - gone away,' she said, and shook him by the arms. 'You're not there any longer. What is it?' Then, quickly:' Is it this fortune-teller? Sir - Sir Harvey Gilman ? How is he?'

  'He's as well as can be expected.'

  'That means he's going to die, doesn't it?' asked Lesley. Enlightenment seemed to come to her. 'Dick, listen! Is that why you're looking and acting like this?' Then she regarded him with horror. 'You don't think I did that deliberately, do you?'

  ' No, of course not!'

  'So help me,' he swore to himself, 'I will not drop a single hint! No incautious word, no blurted question that would give the show away' The whole thing was full of pitfalls. His own voice sounded hollow and hypocritical and false, at least to his own ears. Patting her arm, he raised his eyes to the wall beside the fireplace; and the first thing he saw was the yellow broadsheet of one of his own plays, called Poisoner's Mistake.) ' Do you ?' persisted Lesley.

  'My dear girl! Shoot at him deliberately? You'd never even met the old boy before, had you?'

  'Never!' A film of tears came over her eyes.' I -1 didn't so much as hear his name, until afterwards. Somebody told me.'

  He attempted a laugh.

  'Then there's nothing to worry about, surely? Just forget it. By the way, what had he been saying to you ?'

  Dick hadn't meant to ask this. He had sworn an oath to himself; he could have yelled with exasperation when the words slipped out. Some uncontrollable impulse pushed him and seized him and swept him along in spite of himself.

  'But I told you!' replied Lesley. 'The usual thing about a happy life, and a little illness, and a letter arriving with some pleasant news - You do believe me ?'

  'Of course.'

  She moved back towards the sofa, and he followed. He would have liked to sit opposite her, to study her under the light, to get away from the disturbing nearness of her physical presence. But her eyes expected him to sit down beside her, and he did so.

  Lesley stared at the carpet. Her hair fell a little forward, hiding the line of her cheek.

  ' If he does die, Dick, what will they do to me?'

  ' Nothing at all. It was an accident'

  ' I mean... will the police come and see me, or anything like that?'

  The room was absolutely silent.

  Dick stretched out his hand for the cigarette-box on the table behind the sofa. A puke shook in his arm, and he wondered if he could keep the hand from shaking. They seemed poised in an unreal void, of books and pictures and lamplight

  "There'll have to be an inquest, I'm afraid.'

  'You mean it'll be in the papers? Shall I have to give my name?'

  ' It's only a formality, Lesley - And why not ?'

  'No reason! Only...' She peered round at him; evidently frightened, yet with a smile of wry wistfulness. 'Only, you see, all I know about such things is what you've taught me.'

  ' What I've taught you ?'

  She nodded towards the ranks of books, riddled with their curious criminal histories like worms in apples, and at the garish pictures and playbills which had seemed such excellent fun when you dealt with crime on paper.

  'You're awfully interested in such things.' She smiled. 'I hate death, but I think I'm interested too. It is fascinating, in a way. Hundreds of people, al
l with funny thoughts locked up inside them ...' Then Lesley said a surprising thing. ' I want to be respectable! ‘ she cried out suddenly. ' I do so want to be respectable!'

  He essayed a light tone.

  'And can't you manage to be respectable?'

  'Darling, please don't joke! And then I get involved in this dreadful mess, through no fault of my own.' Again she turned round, with such a yearning of appeal that it destroyed his power to reason. 'But it won't spoil our celebration, will it?'

  'You mean - to-morrow night?'

  'Yes. Our dinner together.'

  'Nothing could keep me away. Will there be any other guests?'

  She stared at him.

  ' You don't want any other guests, do you ? - Dick, what's wrong? Why are you going away from me? In another minute, you know, I shall be getting funny ideas myself.'

  ' There's nothing wrong! I only ...'

  ' I want everything to be perfect for us! Everything! And especially, am I being sentimental?) I want everything to be perfect to-morrow. Because I've got something to tell you. And I've got something to show you.'

  ' Oh ? What have you got to tell me ? ‘

  He had taken a cigarette from the box and lighted it And, as he asked this question, the knocker out on the front door began to rap sharply. Lesley uttered an exclamation and sat back.

  Dick hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry for the interruption. Probably glad, since the emotional temperature was going up again and for the life of him he could not look away from Lesley's eyes. He could relax, for a moment at least, the fever of concentration on giving nothing away. So he hurried out to the front door, opened it, and blinked in surprise at the visitor who was shifting from one foot to the other on the doormat.

  'Er - good evening,' said the visitor. 'Sorry to trouble you at this time of night'

  ' Not at all, sir. Come in.'

  Down by the gate stood a dilapidated Ford, its engine throbbing. The visitor made a sign with his hand to someone inside the Ford, who switched off the motor. Then he entered with an air of some diffidence.

  George Converse, Baron Ashe, was the only peer of the realm in Dick's acquaintance. Having frequently met such persons in fiction, however - where they are always haughtily aristocratic, or languidly epigrammatic, or dodderingly futile - Dick found Lord Ashe something of a surprise.