Till Death Do Us Part dgf-15 Read online

  He was a middle-sized wiry man in his early sixties, with iron-grey hair and a pinkish complexion, but a scholarly preoccupied face. You seldom saw him. He was supposed to be compiling an interminable history of his family. His clothes had always a vaguely shabby look, not surprising when you considered his taxes and his chronic state of being hard up. But he could be good company when he chose, or when he did not seem to run down like a clock.

  And, as he followed Dick down the passage, Dick was thinking of certain words which Cynthia Drew had used in that very cottage earlier this evening. 'Why does Lord Ashe always look so oddly at poor Lesley, on the few occasions when he has seen her?'

  For Lord Ashe stopped abruptly on the threshold of the study, and he was looking oddly at Lesley now. Lesley jumped to her feet,

  'H'm, yes,' muttered the visitor. 'Yes, yes, yes!' Then he roused himself, with a courteous bow and smile. 'Miss Grant, isn't it? I - er - thought...' Evidently at a loss, he turned to Dick.' My dear boy, there's the very devil to pay.'

  'About what ?' cried Lesley.

  'It's perfectly all right, Miss Grant!' Lord Ashe assured her soothingly. 'On my word of honour, there is nothing to worry about But I am rather glad to find you. I - er -didn't expect to find you here.'

  'I -1 only dropped in!'

  'Yes, yes. Of course.' Again he turned to Dick. 'I've just been down to -' He nodded towards the other cottage. 'I thought it was my duty to go.' Lord Ashe did not seem to relish this duty. 'But the place is all dark, and nobody answered when I knocked.'

  ·That's all right Sir Harvey's settled in for the night’

  Lord Ashe looked surprised.

  ' But isn't the doctor there ? Or a trained nurse ?'

  ' No. Dr Middlesworth didn't think it was necessary.'

  'But, my dear boy! Is that wise? Still, I suppose Middlesworth knows his business. How is the patient? I -er - I suppose everybody's been bothering you with that question all evening, but I felt I ought to come in and ask.'

  . 'The patient,' said Dick, 'is as well as can be expected. What's this about there being the devil to pay?' 'Somebody's stolen a rifle,' answered Lord Ashe. There was a silence.

  An evil silence, suggesting a design completed. Taking a spectacle-case from the pocket of his loose tweed coat, Lord Ashe extracted a rimless pince-nez and fitted the pince-nez into place on his nose.

  ' Please tell me, Miss - er - Grant. After the regrettable accident this afternoon, when the rifle went off by accident, do you happen to remember what you did with that rifle?'

  Lesley regarded him wide-eyed.

  ' I gave it back to Major Price. Anyone can tell you that'

  'Yes. Exactly. So everyone agrees. But you don't by any chance recall what happened to the rifle after you gave it to Major Price?'

  Lesley shook her head and shivered.

  'Major Price,' she replied, 'was collecting up the guns when the storm broke. He had them all in a line on the counter of the shooting-range. After that ghastly thing happened, I -I just threw the rifle at him. I think he put it with the others on the counter. But I'm not sure. I was horribly upset. I asked Dick here to take me home.'

  'H'm, yes. Do you happen to remember, my boy?'

  Dick tried to focus his mind on that scene of rain and confusion and blowing tents, which seemed so long ago as to be part of another age.

  'Yes, that's what happened,' he agreed. 'When Sir Harvey collapsed, I stuck my head out of the tent and called to Major Price and Dr Middlesworth.'

  'And then?'

  'Bill Earnshaw - that's the bank-manager, you know,' Dick explained, with a hazy notion that Lord Ashe lived so remote from village-life as not to recognize this name -'Bill Earnshaw had just come up. Major Price asked Bill to mind the rifles while the major and Dr Middlesworth carried Sir Harvey to the doctor's car. That's all I can tell you.'

  ' Exactly,' said Lord Ashe.

  'Then what's wrong, sir?' 'Major Price, you see, says that nobody abstracted a rifle while he was there. Mr Earnshaw declares that nobody abstracted a rifle while he was there. Yet the rifle is gone.'

  Lesley hesitated.' It wasn't the same rifle as I... ?' 'Yes.'

  On the third finger of Lord Ashe's left hand was a small seal ring, dullish and unobtrusive. Dick noticed it as the other lifted a hand to his pince-nez. So did Lesley, who seemed to have grown more flustered than ever since their visitor's entrance. Lord Ashe now played his celebrated trick of running down and trailing off like a gramophone.

  ' Er - I daresay it's of no importance,' he said at length. The needle had caught its groove; the record revolved again. 'But Major Price and Mr Earnshaw were rather heated about it. I believe the major played some stupid joke on Mr Earnshaw at the shooting-range this afternoon, and suspected Mr Earnshaw of trying - as they say - to get level.

  'But it's extraordinary. Most extraordinary! Especially when you consider all the rumours that are going about.'

  'What rumours?' asked Lesley. She clenched her hands. ' Please tell me! Are they saying things about me ?'

  'My dear young lady! Good heavens! No! But I have even heard, for instance, that Sir Harvey Gilman is not seriously hurt. Let us hope so. My grand-uncle Stephen, in the South African War, received a very dangerous bullet-wound and yet survived. He was alive then, of course. That is to say, the incident occurred during his lifetime. My dear boy, I shall not intrude on you any longer. Er - have you transportation, Miss Grant?'

  ' Transportation ?'

  'To go home,' explained Lord Ashe.

  'No. I - I walked.'

  'Then may I offer you a lift? I have the Ford outside, and Perkins is a careful driver.'

  'Thank you, Lord Ashe. I suppose I'd better go.'

  Her eyes begged Dick Markham to suggest an excuse for her to stay and talk a little longer. There was almost a hysteria in her manner, silently asking for that word. And he would not give the word.

  If she stayed for five minutes longer, he knew, he would blurt out the whole story. Under the sanity and placidness of Lord Ashe's presence, values were shifting and sinking back to normal. For a second he had forgotten, or nearly forgotten, the situation as it existed. Then, with a shock, it was back again. He realized very clearly that he loved

  Lesley, and would continue to love her. He was fed up; he couldn't stand any more.

  So they left him, and it tore at his heart to watch Lesley's face. They were no sooner outside than he wanted to call out,' Come back! This isn't true 1 Let me tell you about it!'

  But the Ford moved away.

  His cigarette had gone out. He threw it away into the damp grass of the front garden, standing at the door under the high incurious stars. Then he turned back into the cottage.

  He went into the little dining-room, from which he fetched a glass, a syphon, and a bottle of whisky. He took these into the study, and put them down on the typewriter-desk. But his head swam inexplicably. He was tired, dizzily tired, so that it seemed an exertion out of all proportion to remove a metal, bottle-cap or press the handle of a soda-syphon.

  So he went over and lay down on his back on the sofa.

  'I'll just close my eyes for a moment,' he said. 'The lights being on will keep me awake. Anyway, I don't want to sleep. I'll just close my eyes for a moment. Then I'll get up and pour myself a drink.'

  The calm lamplight lay on his eyes. The diamond-paned windows, looking out over the side-garden to the east, had been set open like little doors; their catches rattled to a night-wind that made a frothing of leaves outside. Presently the distant church-clock struck midnight, but he did not hear it.

  If anybody had peered in through the window - and it is now certain that, in the thin dwindling hours, a certain face did peer in - this person would have seen a light-haired young man, with a strong jaw but far too much imaginative development in the forehead, lying on a rucked-up sofa in grey flannels and an untidy sports-coat, and muttering white-faced in his sleep.

  His dreams were horrible. He does not now rememb
er what they were: perhaps because of the sequel. To Dick Markham those hours, when he did not 'go' to sleep but was knocked out by it, remain only as a blank black severance from the real world until something pierced through it. Something clamoured and called with an intensity of shrillness...

  Dick started to half-wakefulness, rolled, and saved himself from tumbling off to the floor. He had it now. The telephone was ringing.

  Dazed-eyed, cramped about the back and waist, he struggled to sit upright. His first thought was that he had wormed out of a very unpleasant dream, something about Lesley Grant poisoning husbands; but, thank God, that was all over now. His next thought was surprise to find himself here on the sofa; and the lights burning; and the eastern windows tinged a pinkish-blue colour - ethereal, making the glass luminous - from the rising sun.

  All this time the telephone kept ringing. He got up, on cramped leg-muscles, and stumbled across to the typewriter-desk. Though he was still only half awake when he picked up the receiver, the whispering voice which breathed out of the phone recalled him with its urgency.

  'Colonel Pope's cottage,' said that thin voice.'Come at once. If you don't come at once, you'll be too late’

  The line went dead.

  And Dick Markham remembered everything.

  CHAPTER 7

  'WHO'S speaking?' he said. 'Who's...?'

  But there was no response. It had been a mere whisper of a voice, unidentifiable.

  Putting down the receiver, Dick pressed his hands against his eyes and shook his head violently to clear it. The ghostly light outside the windows, its bluish tinge fading, washed this room with indeterminate colour. His wrist-watch had stopped, but the time must be past five o'clock.

  There was not even time to think, now. He hurried out of the cottage, feeling grimy and unshaven as he emerged into the hush and dimness of morning, and ran eastwards along the lane as hard as he could run.

  All sounds acquired a new sharpness in this dead world. The twitter of a bird, a rustle in the grass, the thud of his own running footfalls in a dirt lane, rose as clearly to the ear as the clean freshness of dew rose to the nostrils. He had passed the untenanted house, and was just within sight of Sir Harvey Gilman's cottage beyond, when he saw that something was happening there.

  A light went on in the sitting-room.

  Ahead of him it was still dusky. On his left, parallel with the lane, began the thick coppice of birches which pressed up along the stone boundary wall. On his right, some hundred odd yards ahead, stood the cottage. There was no obstruction in front of it: he could dimly see the whitewashed stone, and the black beams, and the low-pitched shingled roof, set back from the road in its front garden.

  But beside and beyond it, also eastwards and parallel with the lane, stretched the thick orchard of fruit-trees which formed a kind of tunnel with the birch-copse opposite. That tunnel was the narrow lane. Through it poured narrowly the pinkish light, now tinged with watery yellow, of the rising sun.

  It penetrated only there, leaving the sides of the road in shadow. Glints of it were caught and held in thick foliage. But it paled the glow of thin electric light which had been switched on inside two windows - ground-floor windows, now uncurtained - of Sir Harvey Gilman's cottage.

  The sitting-room, not a doubt of it

  The sitting-room, where he had been talking to the old boy last night, with its windows facing the lane.

  Dick Markham stopped short, his heart thudding and the queasiness of an empty stomach taking hold at early morning.

  He did not quite know he was running so hard, or what he expected to find. Apparently Sir Harvey was up early, since he had already drawn back the curtains and switched on the light. Dick walked forward slowly in that eerie dusk, facing the tunnel of sunlight which fell at his feet, and repeated to himself that he did not know. But, when he was less than thirty yards from the cottage, at last he knew.

  A slight rasping noise, as of metal against stone, made him turn his eyes to the left, along the boundary wall of Ashe Hall Park.

  Somebody, hidden from sight behind that low stone wall, was running out a rifle. Somebody was steadying the barrel of the rifle on top of the wall; somebody was aiming, with carefully drawn sights, at one of the lighted windows in the cottage opposite.

  ' Hey!’ yelled Dick Markham.

  But it went unheard when somebody fired a shot.

  The report of the rifle cracked out with inhuman loudness, sending birds whirring up from the trees. Dick's long eyesight caught the star of the bullet-hole in window-glass. Then the rifle vanished. Somebody was running, thrashing, perhaps even laughing, in the birch-coppice among the dense twilight trees. Echoes settled back to disturbed chirpings; the marksman had gone.

  For perhaps ten seconds Dick stood there motionless.

  He did not run now, since he believed with horrible certainty that he knew what had happened. To chase any marksman in that dense coppice - even if you wanted to chase the marksman - would be hopeless.

  The edge of the sun showed itself, a tip of fiery white-gold behind the dark screen of trees, with only the little lane between. The light, shone straight along that lane into Dick's eyes. Some third person, who must also have heard the shot, appeared in the lane from the easterly direction.

  Though the sunlight was still not bright, that figure remained for a few moments a silhouette, hurrying towards Dick.

  ·What is it? Who's there?' the figure called. He recognized the voice of Cynthia Drew, and he ran forward even as she ran to meet him. They met just outside the front garden of Sir Harvey's cottage. Cynthia, wearing the same pinkish-coloured jumper and brown skirt she had worn the night before, stopped short and stared at him in astonishment.

  'Dick! What is it?'

  ' 'It's trouble, I'm afraid.'

  'But what on earth are you doing here?'

  'If it comes to that, Cynthia, what are you doing here?'

  She made a gesture. 'I couldn't sleep. I went for a walk.' Cynthia, slim yet very sturdy, should have been the last girl in the world to be called fanciful or imaginative. But she saw his expression, and her hands moved up and pressed against her breast. The sun behind her turned the edges of her hair to clear gold. 'Dick! Was what we heard...?'

  'Yes. I think so.'

  Until this moment, until he had come fully in front of the cottage, he would not turn fully round to the right and look at it. But he did so now, seeing what he expected to see.

  Set some thirty feet back from the road in an unkempt front garden, the cottage had a longish frontage. But it was a little low doll's house of a place, with little dormer windows projecting from the slope of the dark-shingled roof to form an upper floor. Its whitewashed stone front and crooked black beams lay shadowed by the fruit-orchard eastwards. On the ground floor, the two illuminated windows - just to the left of the front door - showed what was inside.

  Last night, Dick remembered, Sir Harvey Gilman had been sitting in an easy-chair beside the big writing-table in the middle of the room. Now the easy-chair had been moved round to face the table, as though someone were sitting there to write. Someone was sitting there; even the dwarfed view through the window showed it to be Sir Harvey; but he was not writing.

  The hanging lamp in its tan-coloured shade shed light down across the pathologist's bald head. His chin was sunk forward on his chest. His arms lay quietly along the arms of the chair. You might have thought him dozing, a figure of peace, if you bad not noticed the light on the whitish-edged, clean-drilled bullet-hole through window-glass -and seen that this bullet-hole was just in line with the bald skull.

  Dick felt a physical sickness rising in his throat. But he conquered this. Cynthia, very steady and composed, followed the direction of his glance; her teeth fastened in her lower lip.

  'That's the second time,' Dick said. 'Yesterday I saw the bullet-hole jump up in the wall of the tent. To-day I saw it jump up in the window. But it doesn't get any easier. I think .. .Just a minute!'

  He swung rou
nd to look at the stone boundary wall, opposite those windows, with the screen of birch-trees rising dark above it. In three strides he crossed the strip of coarse grass separating the wall from the lane, and peered into the semi-gloom beyond the wall. Something had been thrown down under the trees there, left behind when the marksman fled.

  Vaulting over the wall, completely disregarding any question of fingerprints, Dick picked up this object It was a .22 calibre slide-action repeating rifle: a Winchester 61. He could not doubt it was the same one he expected to find.

  After Lesley Grant had given back this rifle to Major Price yesterday afternoon, the rifle had been stolen from the shooting-gallery. That was what Lord Ashe had said.

  ' Don't!' cried Cynthia Drew.

  'Don't what?'

  'Don't look like that!'

  But Dick's expression was not consternation. It was one of crazy triumph. For, whoever might have stolen that rifle, it could not possibly have been Lesley Grant

  He, Dick Markham, had been with her all the time after the 'accident'; he had taken her home; he had remained with her for several hours. And she had not taken the rifle. Not only was he prepared to swear to this: he knew it to be the simple truth.

  Dropping the rifle on the ground again, Dick vaulted back over the wall. Lesley, at least, couldn't have donethis’ He hardly saw or heard Cynthia, who was saying something he did not afterwards remember. Instead he set off at a run towards Sir Harvey's cottage.

  No fence enclosed the front garden. Unkempt grass dragged at your shoes like wires as you crossed it. It was going to be a hot day, too; the earth breathed up moist warmth, dissolving dew-cobwebs; a wasp circled up out of the fruit-orchard; the front of the cottage itself exhaled an odour of old wood and stone. Dick approached the window with the bullet-hole - it was the right-hand one as you faced the house - and flattened his face against the grimy glass.

  Then, cupping his hands round his eyes, he stared again.

  Under dusty lamplight, contrasting with broadening day, the figure of the little pathologist sat motionless in front of the big table. You saw his face in profile, its chin-muscles sagging and the eyes partly open. That he was looking at a dead man Dick Markham did not doubt. But there was something wrong here, something very wrong ...