She Died a Lady E-Book

John Dickson Carr

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 333

Beschreibung

Rita Wainwright's love affair with Barry Sullivan is flamboyant enough to deserve a dramatic ending, so that when the pair of them vanish over a cliff one rainy night, leaving a farewell note for Rita's husband, no one doubts for a moment that it is a case of suicide – except for Doctor Luke, one of the few people who genuinely liked her. Sir Henry Merrivale – the fabulous 'H.M.' – is staying in the area, having his portrait painted as a Roman senator. Although confined to a bath-chair with an injured toe, this does not stop him getting about – occasionally in toga and laurels – and solving what is too much for the sharp-eyed doctor.

Leseprobe

SHE DIED A LADY

John Dickson Carr (here writing as ‘Carter Dickson’) was born in 1906 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a lawyer. While at school and college, he wrote ghost, detective and adventure stories. After studying law, he headed to Paris in 1928. Once there, he lost any desire to study law and soon turned to writing crime fiction full-time. His first novel, It Walks by Night, was published in 1930. Two years later, he moved to England with his English wife; thereafter he became a prolific author and became a master of the locked-room mystery. He also wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, radio plays, dozens of short stories, and magazine reviews. He died in 1977 in South Carolina.

She Died a Lady

JOHN DICKSON CARR

writing as

CARTER DICKSON

First published in 1943 by Penguin Books.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

1

Copyright © John Dickson Carr 1943

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

ISBN 978 1 84697 493 9

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 207 4

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on requestfrom the British Library.

Typeset by 3btype.com

1

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 highlights 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 to ’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 dramatise 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 off 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 now.’

(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-dramatisation. 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!’

Then she became literary. The dangerous thing about this high-flown talk was that she meant every word of it.

‘His face is a kind of ghost that keeps coming between me and Barry all the time. I want him to be happy and yet neither of us can be happy.’

‘Tell me, Rita. Were you ever in love with Alec?’

‘Yes, I was. In a way. He was perfectly charming when I first knew him. He used to call me Dolores. After Swinburne’s Dolores, you know.’

‘And now?’

‘Well? He doesn’t beat me, or anything like that. But –’

‘How long has it been since you’ve had physical relations with Alec?’

Her face grew tragic.

‘I keep telling you, Dr Luke, it isn’t like that at all! This affair with Barry is something entirely different. It’s a kind of spiritual rebirth. Now don’t rub your hand over your forehead, and sit there looking at me over your spectacles and down your nose!’

‘I was only . . .’

‘It’s something I can’t describe. I can help Barry in his art, and he can help me in mine. He’s going to be a great actor one day. He laughs at me when I say that; but it’s true, and I can help him. All the same, that doesn’t solve my particular problem. I’m nearly going crazy under it. I want your advice, of course, though I know what it’ll be beforehand. But what I want most of all is something that will make me sleep for just one night. Can’t you please give me something that will make me sleep?’

Fifteen minutes later, Rita left. I stood and watched her go down the side path between the laurel hedges. Once, before reaching the gate, she looked into her handbag as though to make sure something was there. She had been on the edge of hysteria while telling her story. But hysteria was gone now. In the way she touched and smoothed her hair, in the very set of her shoulders, you could see a dreaminess as well as a defiance. She was eager to get back home to ‘Mon Repos’ and to Barry Sullivan.

2

On the evening of Saturday, the thirtieth of June, I went out to the Wainrights’ house to play cards.

It was thick, thundery weather. Matters were straining towards a breaking-point in more respects than one. France had capitulated; the Führer was in Paris; a disorganised weaponless British army had crawled back, exhausted, to dry its wounds on the beaches where it might presently have to fight. But we were still reasonably cheerful, with myself as complacent as the rest. ‘We’re all together now,’ we said; ‘it’ll be better’ – God knows why.

Even in our little world of Lyncombe there was impending tragedy as clearly to be heard as a knocking at a door. I learned more about the Wainright-Sullivan business when I talked to Tom on the day after Rita’s visit.

‘May cause scandal?’ echoed Tom, who was fastening his bag preparatory to the morning round of calls. ‘May cause scandal? It’s a flaming scandal already.’

‘You mean it’s being talked about in the village?’

‘It’s being talked about all over North Devon. If it weren’t for this war situation, you’d hear nothing else.’

‘Then why wasn’t I told about it?’

‘My dear governor,’ said Tom, in that irritatingly kindly way of his, ‘you can’t even see what’s under your own nose. And nobody ever tells you gossip anyway. You just wouldn’t be interested. Let me help you into a chair.’

‘Confound it, sir, I’m not as doddering as all that!’

‘No, but you’ve got to be careful of that heart,’ said my serious-minded son. ‘All the same,’ he added, whacking shut the catch of his medicine-case, ‘it beats me how people can carry on like that and think they’re not noticed. That woman has completely lost her head.’

‘What’s . . . being said?’

‘Oh, that Mrs Wainright is an evil woman leading on an innocent young man.’ Tom shook his head, drew himself up, and prepared to lecture. ‘That’s medically and biologically unsound, by the way. You see –’

‘I am sufficiently acquainted with the facts of life, young man. Your presence in this world testifies to that. So he gets all the sympathy, then?’

‘If you could call it sympathy, yes.’

‘What’s this Barry Sullivan like? Do you know?’

‘I haven’t met him, but they say he’s a decent sort. Free spender; typical Yank; that kind of thing. All the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if he and Mrs Wainright got together and murdered the old man.’

Tom delivered this statement with a wise and portentous air. He didn’t believe it himself; it was just his way of airing knowledge, or fancied knowledge; but it struck so sharply and unpleasantly in line with my own thoughts that I reacted as fathers will.

‘Nonsense!’ I said.

Tom teetered back on his heels.

‘You think so?’ he said grandly. ‘Look at Thompson and Bywaters. Look at Rattenbury and Stoner. Look at . . . well, there must be a lot of them. A married woman approaching middle age falls for a mere youngster.’

‘Who are you to be talking about mere youngsters? You’re only thirty-five yourself.’

‘And what do they do?’ inquired Tom. ‘They don’t do anything sensible, like getting a divorce. No. They go scatty and kill the husband. It happens in nine cases out of ten; but don’t ask me why it happens.’

(Talk to one of them, my lad; see the nerves shake and the brain dither and the self-control dissolve; then perhaps you’ll understand.)

‘But I can’t stand here gassing,’ pursued Tom, stamping his feet on the floor, and picking up the medicine-case. He is large and broad and sandy-haired, as I was at his age. ‘Got an interesting case out Exmoor way.’

‘It must be something special, if you call it interesting.’

Tom grinned.

‘It’s not the case. It’s the personality. Old boy named Merrivale, Sir Henry Merrivale. He’s staying with Paul Ferrars at Ridd Farm.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He fractured his big toe. He was up to some shenanigans – can’t imagine what – and he fractured his big toe. It’s worth going out there just to hear his language. I’m going to keep him in a wheelchair for six weeks. But if you are interested in Mrs Wainright’s latest escapade . . .’

‘I am.’

‘Right. I’ll see if I can pump Paul Ferrars. Discreetly, of course. He must know her pretty well; he painted her picture a year or so ago.’

But I forbade this as unethical, and preached Tom quite a lecture about it. So I waited for over a month, while the world continued to clatter round our ears and people talked of little but Adolf Hitler. Barry Sullivan, I learned, had gone back to London. I drove out once to see Rita and Alec, but the maid said they were at Minehead. Then, on that overcast Saturday morning, I met Alec.

Anybody would have been shocked at the change in him. I met him on the cliff-road, between Lyncombe and ‘Mon Repos’. He was stumping along slowly and aimlessly, his hands clasped behind his back; even at a distance you could see him shaking his head from side to side. He wore no hat; the wind ruffled his sparse greyish hair and flapped back his old alpaca coat.

Though shortish in figure, Alec Wainright used to have a thick breadth of shoulder. Now he seemed to have shrunk. His square, blunt-featured face, with the kindly expression and grey eyes under tufted eyebrows, had become blurred. It was not that the face had degenerated, or even changed in any definable way: it had merely lost its expression, heightened by a slight twitching of the eyelid.

Alec was not drunk, but he was in a dream. I had to call out to him.

‘Dr Croxley!’ he said, and cleared his throat. His eyes lighted up a little. To Alec I was not Dr Luke or even plain Luke; I had the formal title. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he continued, and kept on clearing his throat. ‘I’ve been wanting to see you. Intending to see you. But –’

He made a vague gesture, as though he could not at the moment recall the reason.

‘Come over here,’ he urged. ‘This bench. Sit down.’

There was a stiff breeze blowing, and I said I wished Alec had a hat. Vaguely fussed, he fished an old cloth cap out of his pocket and crammed it on. Then he sat down beside me on the bench. Still he kept shaking his head from side to side in a depressed way.

‘They don’t realise,’ he said in his gentle voice. ‘They don’t realise!’

This made me turn round, until I saw what he meant.

‘He’s coming. He’ll be here any day now,’ said Alec. ‘He’s got the planes; he’s got troops; he’s got everything. But when I tell them at the pub, they say, “Oh, for God’s sake shut up! Haven’t we got enough to depress us without that?”’

Alec sat back, folding his stumpy arms.

‘And, do you know, in a way they’re quite right. But they don’t realise. Look here!’ This time he fished a crumpled newspaper out of his pocket. ‘See this item?’

‘Which item?’

‘Never mind. The liner Washington is coming to Galway to pick up Americans who want to get back to the States. The American Embassy says it’s their last chance. What does that mean? Invasion. Don’t they realise that?’

His fretful voice trailed away. But, at the words, no friend of Alec’s could fail to see a sudden hope.

‘Speaking of Americans . . .’ I began.

‘Yes. I knew there was something I wanted to tell you.’ Alec rubbed his forehead. ‘It’s about young Sullivan. Barry Sullivan, you know. Nice lad. I don’t know if you’ve met him?’

‘Is he going back by the Washington?’

Alec blinked at me and made fussed gestures.

‘No, no, no! I never said that. Barry’s not going back to America. On the contrary, he’s come down to visit us again. Arrived last night.’

This, I think, was where I became most conscious of the conviction that we were heading for disaster.

‘Here’s what I wondered,’ pursued Alec, with a meagre attempt at heartiness in his voice. ‘What about coming out to the house tonight for some cards. Like the old days. Eh?’

‘With the greatest of pleasure. But –’

‘I’d thought of inviting Molly Grange,’ said Alec. ‘You know: the solicitor’s little girl. Young Barry seems rather keen on her, and I’ve had her out there for him several times.’ Alec smiled a rumpled smile; he was really anxious to please. ‘I had even thought of inviting Paul Ferrars, that artist chap at Ridd Farm, and a guest he’s got, and perhaps Agnes Doyle. Then we could have two tables.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘But Molly, it seems, isn’t coming home from Barnstaple this weekend. And, anyway, Rita thinks it would be more cosy and intimate if we just had the four of us. This is the maid’s night off, and a bigger crowd is awkward.’

‘Of course.’

Alec looked out to sea, a wrinkle between his eyebrows. His determination to please, his evident concentration on it despite other matters that racked his mind, was dogged and somewhat pathetic.

‘We ought to entertain more, you know. Yes. We really ought to entertain more. Have young people about us. I realise it’s dull for Rita. And she says it’s bad for me. Thinks I’m getting morbid.’

‘You are. And, frankly, if you don’t stop this drinking –’

‘My dear fellow!’ breathed Alec, in a tone of hollow and injured astonishment. ‘Are you trying to tell me I’m drunk?’

‘No. Not now. But you polish off a pint of whisky every night before you go to bed, and if you don’t stop it –’

Once more Alec looked out to sea. Folding his hands, he smoothed the baggy skin across the backs of them. He kept clearing his throat. But his tone changed: he sounded less hazy and muddled.

‘It hasn’t been easy, you know,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been easy.’

‘What hasn’t been easy?’

‘Things,’ answered Alec. He struggled with himself. ‘Financial things. Among others. I had a lot of French securities. Never mind. We can’t put the clock back to . . .’ Here Alec sat up, galvanised. ‘I almost forgot. Watch: I’ve left my watch back home. Do you happen to know what time it is?’

‘It can’t be much past twelve.’

‘Twelve! Good lord, I’ve got to get back! The news, you know. One o’clock news. Mustn’t miss the news.’

His anxiety was so infectious that my own fingers shook when I took my watch out of my pocket.

‘But, man, it’s only five minutes past noon! You’ve got all the time in the world!’

Alec shook his head.

‘Mustn’t risk missing the news,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve got my car, of course. Left it down the road a way when I came for a stroll. But I have to walk at a snail’s pace to get to the car. Stiff joints. Look here, you won’t forget about tonight?’ Getting up from the bench, he wrung my hand and looked at me earnestly out of the once-sharp grey eyes. ‘I’m not very entertaining company, I’m afraid. But I’ll try. Maybe we’ll do some puzzles. Both Rita and Barry are fond of puzzles. Tonight. Eight o’clock. Don’t forget.’

I tried to hold him back.

‘Just a minute! Does Rita know about this financial trouble of yours?’

‘No, no, no!’ Alec was shocked. ‘I wouldn’t worry a woman about a thing like that. You mustn’t mention it to her. I haven’t told anybody but you. In fact, Dr Croxley, you’re just about the only friend I’ve got.’

And he stumped away.

I walked back to the village, feeling a little heavier weight of trouble on my shoulders. I wished the rain would fall and get it over with. The sky was lead-coloured; the water dark blue; the headlands, at bare patches in their green, like the colours of a child’s modelling-clay run together.

In the High Street I noticed Molly Grange. Alec had said she wouldn’t be coming back from Barnstaple that weekend – Molly owns and manages a typewriting bureau there – but presumably Rita had been mistaken. Molly smiled at me over her shoulder as she turned in at her father’s gate.

It wasn’t a pleasant day. Tom dashed in for a very late tea just after six. He was doing a post-mortem for the police at Lynton on a somewhat messy suicide; he gave me all the details as he wolfed down bread and butter and jam, and hardly heard what I had to tell him. It had gone eight o’clock, and the sky was darkening, when I drove out the four miles to ‘Mon Repos’.

It would not be blackout time until past nine o’clock. Yet no lights showed in the house. That in itself inspired a feeling of disquiet.

‘Mon Repos’ had originally been a handsome bungalow, large and low-built, with a slanting tiled roof and leaded-paned windows against mellow red brick. Most trees won’t thrive in sea air, and the grass of the lawn was sparse. But a tall yew hedge screened it from the road. There were two sanded drives, one to the front door and one to the garage at the left. Beside the garage was a tennis court. A creeper-hung summer-house stood on the lawn at the right.

Now, however, the whole place had gone faintly to seed. Nothing very noticeable, nothing greatly to remark. The hedge was just beginning to need trimming. Somebody had left bright-coloured beach chairs out in the rain. One of the shutters had a loose hinge, which the handyman – if there was a handyman – had not bothered to repair. It was present less in tangible details than in an atmosphere of subtle decay.

You became conscious of the place’s isolation, of its Godforsaken loneliness after dark. Anything could happen here; and who the wiser?

The light had grown so bad that I was compelled to switch on my head-lamps when I drove in. The tyres of the car crunched on sand. Nothing else stirred. Hardly a breeze from the sea ruffled that muggy heat. Behind the bungalow, beyond a long stretch of damp reddish soil, you could dimly make out the line of the cliffs which fell seventy feet to rocks and water below.

The light of the head-lamps, hooded, ran ahead dimly to the open doors of the garage. It was a double garage, with Rita’s Jaguar inside. As I slowed down, a figure appeared round the side of the house and wandered towards me.

‘Is that you, Doctor?’ Alec called.

‘Yes. I’d better run the car into the garage, in case it rains. Be with you in half a tick.’

But Alec didn’t wait. He blundered over into the glow of the head-lamps, and I had to stop altogether. Putting his hand on the door of the car, he peered up and down the drive.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Who cut the telephone-wires?’

3

The engine of the car had stalled, and I started it again. Alec was not even angry; he sounded merely puzzled and troubled. Though you could smell whisky about him, he was quite sober.

‘Cut the telephone-wires?’

‘It was that damned Johnson, I expect,’ Alec declared without rancour. ‘The gardener, you know. He wasn’t doing his work. Or at least Rita says he wasn’t. So I had to sack him. Or at least Rita sacked him. I hate trouble with people.’

‘But . . .’

‘He did it to spite me. He knows I always ring up Anderson at the Gazette office every evening to see if they’ve got any news that isn’t released to the B.B.C. The phone wouldn’t work. Then, when I lifted it higher, the wires came loose from the little box. They’d been cut and stuck back in again.’

For a second, there, I thought Alec was going to cry.

‘It was a low trick, a damned unsportsmanlike trick,’ he added. ‘Why won’t people let you alone?’

‘Where are Rita and Mr Sullivan?’

Alec blinked.

‘Come to think of it, I don’t know. They must be somewhere about.’ He craned his neck round. ‘They’re not in the house. At least, I don’t think they are.’

‘Hadn’t I better go and round them up, if we’re going to play cards?’

‘Yes. Do that. I’ll go and get us something to drink. But we won’t play cards just yet, if you don’t mind. There’s a very fine radio programme going on at eight-thirty.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m not sure. Romeo and Juliet, I think. Rita particularly wants to hear it. Excuse me.’

He moved across the sparse-grown lawn in the twilight, and stumbled over something. As though instantly conscious that I might think he wasn’t sober, he glanced round, tried to look dignified, and sauntered on.

I ran the car into the garage. A nerve was switching in the calf of my leg when I got out. It was not that I was so anxious to find Rita and young Sullivan: I wanted a chance to think.

First I walked round to the back of the house. The breeze was colder here, smoothing down coarse grass on the edge of the cliff; the stretch of damp red soil was deserted. Hardly seeing anything, deaf and blind with preoccupation about those cut telephone-wires, I circled the bungalow and passed the summer-house.

They must have heard me. From inside the summer-house there was a stifled, startled exclamation. I glanced round – the light was just good enough to see inside – and then I walked on very quickly.

Rita Wainright was half sitting, half lying across a mat on the grubby wooden floor of the summer-house. Her head had been bent back, and her arms were round Sullivan’s shoulders just before he sprang away. Both faces turned towards me. The open mouths, the peculiar guilty shine of the eyes, the frightened spasmodic reaction of heightened senses: I saw these things only in a flash, a sliding past the eye, before I hurried on.

But I saw them.

Perhaps you think that an old duffer like myself shouldn’t have been embarrassed. But I was, badly. Probably more so than those two. It wasn’t the actual fact: which was, after all, only a good-looking woman being kissed. It was the rawness, the grimy floor of the summer-house, the sense of forces now released and beyond control.

Look out: danger, something kept saying. Look out: danger. Look out: danger . . .

Behind me a husky voice called: ‘Dr Luke!’