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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In Ethel Lina White's British Murder Mystery novel, 'While She Sleeps,' readers are drawn into a suspenseful narrative filled with intriguing twists and turns. The story follows a seemingly ordinary woman who becomes entangled in a dark and eerie mystery while trying to uncover the truth behind a series of unsettling events. White's literary style is characterized by its intricately woven plot lines and vivid descriptions, which create a palpable sense of tension and foreboding throughout the novel. Set against the backdrop of 20th century Britain, 'While She Sleeps' reflects the noir tradition of the crime fiction genre with its focus on psychological depth and moral ambiguity. White's exploration of the darker aspects of human nature adds depth and complexity to the narrative, making it a compelling read for fans of classic murder mysteries. Ethel Lina White's own experiences as a writer and her keen observation of human behavior likely inspired her to craft a story that delves into the complexities of motive and deception. Her ability to create a compelling and unforgettable tale makes 'While She Sleeps' a must-read for anyone interested in the intricacies of the mystery genre. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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While She Sleeps
(British Murder Mystery)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
In While She Sleeps, Ethel Lina White turns the most innocent human act—closing one’s eyes against the world—into a crucible of dread, where the borders between rest and risk blur, the rooms that promise refuge become stages for unseen choreography, everyday courtesies mask calculating designs, and a woman’s hard-won independence is tested by the stealthy persistence of those who watch, wait, and exploit the hours of darkness, reminding us that the very routines that sustain modern life—travel, lodging, companionship, even the kindness of strangers—can, under pressure, harbor motives and dangers that awaken precisely when she sleeps in presumed safety and when vigilance is least possible.
While She Sleeps is a British crime and suspense novel by Ethel Lina White, a prominent writer of the 1930s and early 1940s whose work helped shape the era’s female-centered thrillers. Written and published in the early 1940s, it belongs to a moment when domestic spaces, public transit, and temporary accommodations felt newly uncertain, and when the classic mystery was widening into psychological menace. The book’s milieu is recognizably British, with attention to manners, rumor, and class inflections, yet its anxieties feel portable across borders. Readers will find a tightly wound story that favors tension over mere puzzle and atmosphere over ornament.
Without disclosing its later turns, the novel begins from a simple, plausible situation: an ordinary woman claims a brief period of freedom and comfortable rest, only to sense that unseen attention shadows her movements and thickens around her most vulnerable hours. Small incidents raise doubts about coincidence, faces recur where they should not, and a routine arrangement of rooms and companions acquires a sinister shuffle. Sleep, which ought to restore, becomes the most precarious interval. White builds the premise from everyday logistics—meals, lodgings, errands—so that threat seems to bloom from the furniture of normal life rather than from exotic contrivance.
White’s voice is crisp, observant, and slyly ironic, with a gift for turning mild social comedy into a prelude to fear. She sketches side characters in deft, economical strokes, then lets gossip, glances, and chance meetings carry implications far beyond their surface. The tone oscillates between brittle wit and mounting claustrophobia, avoiding gore in favor of suggestion, timing, and the steady abrasion of uncertainty. Misdirection arises not from elaborate riddles but from how perception falters under pressure: who saw what, who seems familiar, who is trustworthy when politeness demands hospitality. The result is suspense that feels intimate, cumulative, and inexorable.
Key themes course beneath the plot: the costs of independence for women moving through public space; the uneasy trade between privacy and convenience; the way civility can shelter predation; and the fragile boundary between wakefulness and surrender in a world that demands constant alertness. White examines how class expectations and social performance can hide motive, how rumor travels faster than truth, and how being watched corrodes judgment. The title encapsulates an ethic of vulnerability—sleep as necessity and liability—that extends to broader questions about who is permitted safety, on what terms, and at whose expense in ostensibly respectable communities.
These concerns feel strikingly contemporary. Readers today navigate crowded transport, rented rooms, and networks of strangers while negotiating visibility, consent, and control, and White’s scenario distills those pressures into their primal elements. The novel’s emphasis on boundaries—of bodies, rooms, information, and trust—speaks to an age wary of surveillance and manipulation, yet weary of endless vigilance. It also honors the resourcefulness demanded of anyone who travels or lives alone. By refusing sensationalism and focusing instead on ordinary settings sharpened by fear, While She Sleeps invites modern audiences to reflect on the infrastructures of safety they assume, inherit, or improvise.
Approached as a compact study in tension, the book rewards with elegant construction, nimble pacing, and psychological acuity rather than baroque clue-sprinkling. It stands as a vivid entry in British mystery-suspense, bridging the classic era’s interest in order with a newer fixation on dread, and it showcases why Ethel Lina White remains essential reading alongside her better-known titles. For contemporary readers, it offers both a chilling entertainment and a lens on how ordinary lives are shaped by the negotiations of risk. To read While She Sleeps is to witness vulnerability turned into narrative voltage and caution into hard-earned clarity.
Synopsis
Ethel Lina White’s While She Sleeps is a tense British murder mystery that turns the ordinary rituals of daily life into sources of peril. A young woman, recently empowered by a modest windfall and a new sense of independence, decides to live on her own terms. She chooses temporary lodgings and simple pleasures, wanting a break from discretion and supervision. Around her, popular papers and casual gossip dwell on sensational crimes, feeding a climate of unease. White sets the stage by contrasting the heroine’s aspirations with the impersonal churn of a modern city, hinting that unseen attention is gathering as night routinely, inevitably, falls.
In the new routine of rented rooms and shared corridors, the woman meets a cross-section of residents, staff, and neighbors. Everyday interactions—exchanging greetings, borrowing small items, overhearing fragments of conversation—are rendered subtly ambiguous. The setting is comfortably public by daylight yet fragmented and private after dark. White emphasizes small frictions and courtesies that mask private worries and calculations. The heroine prizes her autonomy, but it places her at a remove from old protections, and small lapses in security seem easy to excuse. The novel’s atmosphere grows from the friction between communal living and the solitary thresholds people cross when they go to sleep.
As she settles, minor disturbances accumulate with unnerving regularity. A key goes missing briefly and reappears; a stranger lingers too long in a doorway; a note addressed to another lodger turns up in her things; someone seems to test the lock at night. Each incident is deniable, yet together they suggest a pattern. Torn between pride and caution, the heroine hesitates to raise the alarm and risk ridicule. White lights on the politics of credibility surrounding women’s fears, showing how social niceties can throttle clear warnings. The motif of sleep—necessary, unguarded, deeply private—becomes the point at which independence meets its most vulnerable edge.
While the heroine tries to maintain normality, the narrative opens outward to other minds. Rather than fastening early on a single villain, White presents scattered lives edging toward bad decisions: someone pressed by debt, someone craving status, someone stifled by drudgery. Petty envies and opportunism compound into dangerous intentions. Plans are floated, rehearsed, and revised in the imaginations of people who barely grasp the consequences. This multi-perspective approach keeps readers alert to how crime can germinate in ordinary disappointments and to how proximity, coincidence, and secrecy can align. As the nights pass, motives sharpen, and the heroine’s room acquires an almost theatrical hush.
A change of scene raises the stakes, whether through a short journey, a rearranged sleeping arrangement, or a shift in the building’s occupancy. Familiar safeguards fall away at the worst time: a hallway goes unlit, a watchful neighbor departs, a routine check is skipped. Weather and noise conspire to blur signals. The possibility of help narrows, and small acts—closing a window, drawing curtains, setting an alarm—take on a ritual urgency. White works with tangible, domestic details to build dread, making entrances, stairwells, and thresholds into charged spaces. The question is not if danger exists, but when it will choose its moment.
Countering the pull of menace is a thread of watchfulness that never quite fades. An observant ally—a friend, a colleague, or a wary acquaintance—begins to connect small irregularities. Their concern struggles against the absence of proof and the reluctance of authorities to treat scattered signs as evidence. White engineers a quiet race between vigilance and timing, placing readers at the junction where conjecture must harden into action. The movement toward a nocturnal crisis is steady and unshowy, relying on pacing and inference rather than spectacle. Even as the climax approaches, the identity of the ultimate threat remains unsettled enough to sustain uncertainty.
While She Sleeps endures for its pointed use of ordinary spaces and routines to expose how vulnerability and independence intersect. White’s focus on the social dynamics that shape whether warnings are heard—class inflections, gendered expectations, and the appetite for sensation—gives the story continuing relevance. The title encapsulates the novel’s central tension: trust in the world to hold while one rests, set against the knowledge that the world sometimes fails. Without dwelling on gore or puzzle-box contrivance, the book offers a carefully wound suspense that resonates beyond its final reveal, suggesting that safety is a communal labor as much as a personal habit.
Historical Context
Ethel Lina White (1876–1944) was a Welsh-born British crime novelist whose career flourished in the 1930s and early 1940s, the period often called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. While She Sleeps belongs to this milieu, appearing as Britain moved from interwar unease into wartime disruption. White had left government service at the Ministry of Pensions to write full time, and by the mid‑1930s she was widely read; her novel The Wheel Spins (1936) was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes (1938). That success positioned her prominently among contemporaries and helped frame readers’ expectations for taut, atmospheric, female‑centered suspense.
Set in contemporary England, the social and physical landscape of While She Sleeps aligns with urban and suburban Britain between the late 1930s and early 1940s. London and provincial towns were connected by dense rail and bus networks, and hotels, boarding houses, and rented rooms offered temporary refuge as well as anonymity. The Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department formed the symbolic core of official detection, while coroners’ inquests remained a familiar legal forum in crime narratives. Everyday technologies—door locks, lifts, telegrams, and especially the telephone—shaped both routine life and peril; London introduced the 999 emergency number in 1937, enhancing public expectations of rapid response.
White’s fiction frequently centers on ordinary women, a focus that resonated with British demographics after the First World War. Public debate about “surplus women” followed the 1921 census, and by the 1930s large numbers of single women worked in shops, offices, and hotels, often living away from family. Domestic service, long the dominant female occupation, was declining, while clerical and retail work expanded. Greater female mobility—traveling alone by train, attending cinemas, renting rooms—brought new freedoms but also visible vulnerability in crowded, anonymous spaces. These realities supplied plausible contexts for suspense, as independence and precarity could coexist within the same modern, respectable settings.
The Golden Age prized fair‑play puzzles, codified by figures associated with the Detection Club (founded 1930), and popularized by authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. Ethel Lina White worked adjacent to that mainstream, drawing instead on the “woman‑in‑peril” tradition linked to Mary Roberts Rinehart and to Victorian sensation fiction. Rather than elaborate clue‑grids, she emphasized atmosphere, menace, and the psychology of fear in everyday routines. While She Sleeps fits that shift toward suspense, in which ordinary spaces—lodgings, corridors, streets after dark—become charged with dread, highlighting the fragility of safety without abandoning the genre’s investigative momentum.
British public fascination with modern detection was fed by advances in forensic science and celebrated experts. Fingerprinting and photographic records were well established by the early twentieth century, and high‑profile pathologists such as Sir Bernard Spilsbury helped shape courtroom drama and newspaper coverage in the 1910s–1930s. The popular imagination also retained notorious cases of threatened or murdered women, which true‑crime columns revisited for years. Within fiction, official detectives and local constables interacted with witnesses under formal procedures—statements, line‑ups, inquests—while still relying on human judgment. Such a climate made it credible that institutional authority could be both capable and, at times, fallibly distant.
Crime fiction’s reach in Britain depended on mass‑market infrastructures. Subscription lending libraries—most famously the Boots Book‑Lovers’ Library and W. H. Smith’s service—circulated hardbacks to a large middle‑class readership, while newspapers serialized or reviewed mysteries and amplified true‑crime stories. The BBC, established in the 1920s, brought news bulletins and dramatizations into homes, creating a shared vocabulary of risk and response. Cinema adaptations, including Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, confirmed that suspense narratives could move briskly between page and screen. Writers like White composed with this media ecosystem in mind, crafting compact scenes and cliff‑hangers that matched audience habits shaped by commuting, borrowing, and broadcast listening.
As While She Sleeps reached readers, Britain was entering the Second World War. From September 1939, blackouts darkened streets; civil‑defense routines with air‑raid wardens, sirens, and shelters reordered nocturnal life. National Registration introduced identity cards, and rationing began in early 1940. Travel continued under strain, with timetables adjusted and anxiety palpable. Even when a story did not depict air raids, the sensory world of footsteps in unlit corridors and the uncertainty of strangers shared an immediate wartime resonance. Suspense set against quiet flats, hotels, or suburban trains felt sharper, because ordinary safeguards—light, crowds, predictable schedules—were now fragile or intermittently absent.
In this context, While She Sleeps reflects and critiques its era by placing modern conveniences and institutions under pressure. It exploits the porous boundary between public and private spaces, revealing how anonymity, mobility, and mediated communication can shelter malice as readily as they enable freedom. The work’s emphasis on a woman navigating risk interrogates gendered assumptions about safety and credibility, while the measured presence of police and experts mirrors public reliance on, yet skepticism toward, authority. White’s suspense thereby captures the interwar‑to‑wartime transition: a world confident in progress, yet newly aware that vulnerability may lurk within the routines of everyday life.
While She Sleeps (British Murder Mystery)
CHAPTER ONE. Hail Happy Morn
Miss Loveapple awoke with a smile. She had slept well; her digestion was good—her conscience clear; and she had not an enemy in the world.
There was nothing to warn her that, within the next hour, she would be selected as a victim to be murdered.
As she threw aside the sheets and sat up in bed, she looked beautiful. Just as every dog has his day, every woman has her hour[1q]. Since Miss Loveapple's dress allowance was shaved to the limit, she triumphed when she was in undress.
Her low sleeveless nightdress revealed the whiteness of her skin which had not been exposed to the sun. Her fair hair fell over her shoulders in thick plaits. As she stretched out her arms in a yawn, she seemed to be welcoming the gift of life.
It was a blue windy day in late summer. The sun shone brightly upon her toilet table, striking through the cut-glass trinket set in rainbow gleams. She could hear the welcome rattle of china which told her that the maid was mounting the stairs with her early tea and the Times.
Birds were singing in the beech-tree which shaded her window, as though to celebrate good news. It had come, the night before, by the last post, in a letter from a London house agent. He had told her of an unexpected chance to let her town house, which would enable her to take a rare holiday abroad.
'Switzerland,' she said aloud. 'Mountains. You lucky me.'
Miss Loveapple believed in her luck. She was positive that Providence had drawn up a schedule of beneficent events for her special benefit. If any sceptic doubted that she was under the direct protection of an unseen Patron, she could offer proof of her claim.
To begin with, out of millions of hopeful gamblers, she, alone, was chosen to draw a certain horse in an Irish Sweep[1] and consequently to realise the supreme ambition of her life.
In addition to this spectacular slice of good fortune, she could produce a long list of minor examples of her luck. Royalty died after she had bought a black hat, to justify an extravagance. On the nerve-racking occasion when she had forgotten to provide cakes for her At Home day, it rained heavily, spoiling the hay harvest, but keeping every visitor away.
Little things like that.
Each year, when her vegetable marrows or her gladioli received the coveted blue ticket—First Prize—at the local flower show, she would inhale the hot mashed-grass and fruit-laden atmosphere of the tent, as though it were incense compounded for her.
'My luck again,' she would declare to her disappointed competitors. 'Not your fault. Too bad—when you tried so hard.'
And then her hearty laughter would ring out, for she was genuine rather than tactful.
She was fortunate even over the circumstances in which she was orphaned. Her parents thoughtfully went on living until she was twenty-one and had finished her education and received proper dental attention. She was therefore spared the restrictions imposed upon a minor when they both died of epidemic influenza, just as the Local Authorities had passed the plans of a new by-pass road.
As these involved the sacrifice of the old family home, she received, in compensation, a sum higher than she could have hoped to get had the property come into the open market.
She was on the fringe of the leisured class and had a small private income; so she bought a well-built and comfortable residence—Pond House—which was too large and ambitious for her needs, and settled down to life in a select residential village in Kent.
Soon she was accepted as a fixture, together with her maid, her cat, her dog and everything that was hers. She was popular, for she entered into the social spirit of the community; and although she was younger than the majority of the residents, gardening and housework gave her the exercise she might have missed.
Yet, while she was friendly to all, she was intimate with none. In spite of her breezy good-nature, no one asked her personal questions, or called her by her Christian name. It was doubtful whether any one knew it, for she remained Miss Loveapple, of the Pond House.
On the sole occasion when she burst her sheath of reserve, it was a voluntary impulse. The revelation took place on a warm, wild All Hallows E'en, when a few ladies came to tea with her. Among them was a visitor from London, who brought with her a passport to popularity—a planchette.
She was a dark, skinny woman with the remnants of beauty and a suggestion of parched passion still lingering in her eyes. She wore an artistic gown of nasturtium-hued velvet and a long string of amber beads. Her personality was magnetic, so that the other women were excited to confidences as they sat in the firelight.
The windows of the drawing-room were open to the blue October twilight. Fallen beech-leaves rustled as the wind whirled them over the lawn, covering the violet-border. Witches and wonders were abroad.
'Ask the thingummy if I will get married,' invited a masculine-looking woman wistfully.
The planchette, although plainly anxious to please, had its record for accurate prediction to consider. It hesitated for a little time before it advised her 'not to give up hope.'
The inquirer, whose name was Miss Pitt, laughed in proof of sporting spirit.
'Optimistic beggar,' she said. 'But tactless. The standard of face value in the Spirit World seems much the same as ours.'
It was then that Miss Loveapple asked her question. 'I don't believe in it,' she declared positively. 'But—shall I get my wish?'
The London lady looked at her fine legs—generously displayed in the firelight—her admirable colouring and the firm moulding of her face. When she attempted to convey her own impression to the super-sensitive planchette, it proved instantly responsive.
'Yes,' it wrote firmly. Taking a chance, it added: 'Soon.'
'Wish I could bank on that,' said Miss Loveapple.
'Someone you know, or still a stranger?' hinted the London lady.
'My wish?' Miss Loveapple laughed heartily. 'It isn't a husband...No. I want to have three houses. One town, one country and one seaside.'
As the others stared at her, she spoke breathlessly in her excitement.
'I can't explain it, but it's been my great ambition ever since I can remember. Mother used to tell me about the Royal residences, so perhaps they set me going. Do you know I was furious when I heard that the family had given up Osborne House. Somehow it seemed to break the sequence, like losing a quin or quad...If ever I get hold of a lump sum, I shall have my three houses...Sounds mad, doesn't it?'
'Merely border-line,' said Miss Pitt generously.
All Hallows E'en...The wind blew down the chimney and burst through the window, in gusts of moist earthy air, faintly perfumed with violets. A slip of a moon—panic-stricken—dodged wildly amid the celestial traffic of racing clouds. Spirits drifted like mist from opening graves. The living mingled with the dead...
Not long afterwards, Miss Loveapple drew her horse in the Sweep. After her windfall had been duly pared, she received the sum of four thousand odd pounds. This was promptly put back into circulation by her purchase of two more houses—one in London and a bungalow on the south coast.
While her action was locally criticised, no one was authorised to offer advice. Only her lawyer hinted at the disadvantages.
'This property will prove a white elephant. Besides Rates, Insurance and upkeep, you have all these monthly instalments to pay on your furniture. You will be definitely crippled.'
'No,' said Miss Loveapple, 'my income will be as much as it is now. I've figured it all out. But I shall not cut my Charity list. That might be unlucky. My only worry is whether I am anti-social, having all these empty rooms when people are overcrowded in slums.'
Apparently she came to some working agreement with her conscience, for her three houses made her completely happy. She was now free from the restrictions of environment. Whenever she was bored with the landscape, she could exchange it for the spectacle of waves rolling over the beach. If she grew tired of looking at the wallpaper in her London bedroom, she had only to return to the Pond House.
But far stronger than the satisfaction obtained by scenic change, was the inflation of her sense of ownership. Whenever she moved, she opened her own front door—trod on her own carpet—broke her own china. The knowledge filled her with a consciousness of dormant power and placed her in the small company of maiden queens, dictators and hospital matrons.
At the same time, it endowed her with definite spinster status. Although the news of her engagement would create no real surprise—since she was of eligible age—no one in the village expected her to get married.
On the day when she was chosen for future newspaper publicity—consequent to a nasty experience in order to qualify as 'the victim'—Miss Loveapple was still on the right side of thirty. Those whose taste had not been impaired by the rationed beauty of the Screen would have considered her attractive. Fair-haired, with good features and colouring, she could have posed for a poster of a Britannia who had dieted sufficiently to compromise with modern dress.
On this special morning, after she had reminded herself of the luck of the London offer, she went over the list of her static blessings.
'I am well and strong. I don't owe a cent. The sun is shining. And I have my three houses.'
On the chair beside her, the blue Persian cat, David, lay asleep in his basket, clasping his Woolworth furry toy in his great paws. He was not a year old, but was so enormous that he resembled a lion-cub, while spoiling had kept him in the kitten class.
As Miss Loveapple beamed maternally at him, the maid entered the room, followed by the Aberdeen terrier, Scottie. Elsie was about the same age as her mistress, but she looked older. She was supposed to be delicate, so she did all the lady-like jobs—cleaning silver and arranging flowers—while Miss Loveapple scrubbed and polished.
'Good-morning madam,' she said, speaking in a low, muffled voice. 'I hope you slept well. Here's your young gentleman come to see you.'
Miss Loveapple assisted Scottie to scramble onto the low divan-bed before she spoke.
'I am going to London to-morrow, Elsie.'
'Yes, madam.'
Elsie laid down the tray carefully on the bed-table, poured out a cup of tea, placed a cigarette between her mistress' lips and struck a match to light it. Then she took David from his basket and cuddled him so that his great sleepy head drooped on her shoulder.
'David says,' she remarked, speaking in a loud, coarse voice to prove that she had assumed David's identity, 'David says he doesn't want his mistress to go away from the nice cool country. He says it doesn't make sense to go up to that blinking hot London.'
'Then you can tell David,' said Miss Loveapple, 'that if his mistress doesn't snap at her chance to make some money, there might be no cool country for him and no nice Elsie either.'
Elsie still looked resentful as she nursed the cat in silence while her mistress fed Scottie with biscuits.
Presently Miss Loveapple asked her maid a direct question.
'What have you got against London, Elsie?'
Elsie's pale face grew red. 'Because—Oh, madam, I always feel it's unlucky.'
'Unlucky?' Miss Loveapple's voice was sharp. 'Why?'
'I mean—if you'll excuse the liberty—it was coming the way it did, with gambling and breaking the law.'
It was characteristic of that household that Elsie should refer to luck. But the fact remained that if Miss Loveapple had not acquired a London address, at that moment she would have been secure in her Zone of Safety.
CHAPTER TWO. A Vacuum Cleaner
During the early hours, Miss Loveapple never forgot that she was mistress of three houses[2q]. Later on, she might become supplementary Staff and cheerfully do the heavier work for which Elsie was less adapted by nature; but she always made her toilet at leisure and breakfasted in dignity.
When she came down the shallow stairs, she wore a full-skirted house-coat, pale yellow in colour and patterned with brilliant flowers. It enhanced her natural opulence and suggested prosperity allied with bounty. As the sun—shining through the window behind her—gilded her hair to the semblance of a halo, she might have been a seasonal goddess, bearing her largesse of floral trophies, but also open to a deal with the market gardener.
As usual, she paused on the half-way landing, in order to appreciate the beauty of the property to which she was most attached. Although it had cost more to furnish her London house, she had sunk most money in the Pond House, by installing central heating and remaking the garden.
It was a pleasant Georgian building, panelled in white wood and spaciously but wastefully planned, with broad landings and superfluous steps. There were only two reception-rooms and three bedrooms, but all were large and finely proportioned. None of her houses contained an official maid's-room to mitigate her standard of perfection. She and Elsie chose their sleeping-quarters—and changed them again—according to season and caprice.
Everything looked especially pleasant that sunny morning. The parquet-flooring of the hall advertised her own 'elbow grease.' A vase of second-crop pale-blue delphiniums was reflected in a mirror on the wall. Humming a tuneless melody, Miss Love-apple strolled into the dining-room, which, owing to its superior dimensions—was also the living-room.
The drawing-room looked out on to the front lawn, which was shaded with beech-trees. Here there were only a few flowers—violets under the windows and bulbs planted in the grass. The dining-room, however, ran the entire length of the house and had windows at either end.
In accordance with the general colour scheme, its furnishings were white, relieved with pale green—an extravagant choice which was criticised locally. It had vindicated her by remaining fresh and clean, although even she attributed this to her own labour, rather than luck.
As she crossed to the table, where her breakfast was keeping hot in a chafing-dish, she stared approvingly at the carpet.
'It certainly paid me to get a vacuum,' she reflected. 'I ought to have one in London, too. If I budget strictly over my holiday, perhaps the rent will run to one.'
She cut a piece of bread and threw out crumbs for the birds on the front lawn before she walked to the back windows, to admire the garden. She had transformed it from a gloomy wilderness to its former old-world charm. The pond—which lent its name to the house—had degenerated to a stagnant pool, enclosed with a low railing and shadowed by willow-bushes. Advised by the local builder, and even doing some of the work herself, the hollow had been filled in and the water enclosed in sunken shallow tanks planted with lily-pads. Here, too, was her herb-garden, her famous rose-patch, her perennial-border and the vegetables which won so many prizes.
As she gazed through the window, she sniffed the appetising odour of bacon which Elsie was frying for her own breakfast. The maid was unable to share her mistress' grilled kidneys, owing to a dislike of 'insides'—a disability which Miss Loveapple quoted with a queer pride as proof of Elsie's refinement.
Reminded of her appetite, she sat down at the table and made a large meal, beginning with cereal and ending with toast and honey. When she had finished, she lit a cigarette...
By a strange coincidence, her action synchronized with that of a young man who lay in bed in a darkish London flat. He drained his cracked cup and began to smoke as a prelude to business.
His appearance was typical of the average young man who recognises the value of a good appearance and has conformed to the rules. His voice had the clipped Public School accent[2]—which can be imitated by any one with an ear for vowels and—when dressed—he wore an old school tie, such as can be acquired at its source, or bought in a shop.
His teeth were good, his hair well brushed, his smile pleasant. Certainly his face betrayed nothing of the dark intention in his heart as he stretched out his arm for the Telephone Directory, which lay on the battered bamboo table beside his bed.
It was the red-covered volume and it opened at the 'L' section. Flicking over the pages with fingers which had been recently manicured, he skimmed through the legion of 'Longs.' Occasionally he paused to note a name and then to reject it, but his selections were not so casual as they appeared. Underneath this weeding-out process was a definite purpose.
Although his motive was entirely impersonal, and remote from malevolence, the lady of his choice had to possess certain qualifications before he could be definitely interested. She had to be not only a spinster or widow, but unprotected by any male relative. She had to be of sufficient importance to invite a visit from a burglar, yet not so wealthy as to keep an inconvenient staff of servants. It was essential, too, that she lived in a select but unfashionable locality which was discreetly lit and not over-patrolled by policemen.
In his impatience, he probably passed over some ideal candidates for immortality, as he exhausted the 'Longs' and 'Lords,' on his way to the 'Loves.'
Suddenly his attention was arrested by an uncommon name—'Loveapple.' The prefix was 'Miss,' which encouraged him to notice the address.
No. 19, Madeira Crescent was somewhere in northwest London. It suggested a picture of a solid house, left stranded by the receded tide of fashion, with an imposing flight of steps and a lot of damp fallen leaves on the pavement.
'I'll O.K. her,' he decided indolently. 'Tomorrow will do.'
At that moment, Miss Loveapple felt vaguely depressed and worried. Although she had no knowledge that she had been invited as guest-of-honour to a murder-party, she began to dislike the idea of letting her London house.
The basic idea underlying the acquisition of her three houses was the sense of personal ownership. They must be vacant, swept and garnished, ready for her occupation, whenever she wanted change of scene.
Already she had lowered her standard by letting her bungalow regularly for the summer months. In one way she was rather proud of the fact that it was always in keen demand. It was the result of a definite policy—the installation of a refrigerator and the lavish use of white enamel-paint.
But while it was true that she did not care for the south coast during the holiday season, she always felt guilty about the transaction. She had exploited something which was intensely personal—her seaside house. It was almost as though she had profited in a White Paint Traffic.
Apart from her sense of shame, she vaguely felt that those convenient people who so cheerfully overpaid her for temporary accommodation were bound to leave some shred of their personality behind them. The atmosphere of the bungalow was no longer pure undiluted 'Loveapple,' but a compound of 'Brown, Smith and Robinson.'
She frowned in indecision as she re-read the house agent's letter. He advised her that a client wished to rent a furnished family house in a London suburb for about a month. He added that if she were inclined to consider an offer, he believed that this Major Brand would be a desirable tenant.
The clock ticked away momentous minutes while her future hung in the balance. At that moment she was safe. Miss Loveapple, of the Pond House, Highfield, lived in a different world from that of a gentleman in a darkish flat in the Charing Cross Road. So long as she remained where she was, they were divided by the immensity of Space.
The threat was exclusive to Miss Love-apple of No. 19, Madeira Crescent, London, N.W.
Yet there was a time limit to the danger period, even in her case. If the gentleman called at her London address, according to his schedule, on the following day and found it shuttered and unoccupied he was not likely to waste time over a return journey, which might attract attention. One woman was as good as another for his purpose—and the Telephone Directory was full of other names...
Still a million worlds away from him and secure in the sanctuary of her green-and-white dining-room, Miss Loveapple felt the first stir of her instinct to organise. She believed that she had administrative talent, owing to the fact that she always made a quick decision and stuck to it, regardless of consequence.
In this case, it seemed indicated that she should travel to Switzerland direct from London, in order to save a double railway fare. But while this trip was essential—since she would not accept any tenant she had not first seen and approved—it was necessary to cut her visit as short as possible. There was always extra expense involved in running two separate establishments, although it would not pay her to move her family to town for so limited a period.
Taking up her purse-calendar, she began to calculate dates. That day was the eleventh of August. If she travelled up to London on the twelfth, three days should be sufficient to finish her business. Therefore she would be ready to start on her holiday on the fifteenth, which would allow her a full fortnight abroad.
Although she had not committed herself to a resolution, her mind began to function with fatal ease. First she must telephone to the house agent in London and ask him to arrange a meeting with the Major upon the following morning. When she had received the advance payment—for which she always stipulated—she had to wait until she had passed his cheque through the local branch of the London bank where she had a credit account. Afterwards everything would be in order for her to buy her tickets from Cook.
By this time, details had arranged themselves so tidily in her mind that, unconsciously, they assumed the rigidity of a plan. She waited until nine-fifteen before she put through a call to the house agent's office, when she was annoyed to find that only the staff was present.
After she had expressed her wishes clearly and somewhat in the style of a dictator's ultimatum, she strolled into the garden, to find Elsie.
Although it was still early, the dew had dried even in the shade and the hot air was drawing out the perfume of mignonette and heliotrope from the perennial border. Overblown roses shed their petals in a drift of crimson, yellow and pink over the beds. Patches of clear water amid the lily leaves in the tank reflected the sky in gleams of burning blue.
The maid was not visible, but Miss Love-apple could hear shouts of coarse laughter mingled with the excited barking of a dog. Guided by the sounds, she went through a clipped-yew archway to the drying ground, where Elsie was rolling on the grass with Scottie and David.
At her mistress's approach she rose to her hands and knees and peered up through the hair which covered her eyes, like a lion's mane; the next second she was on her feet, with every permed lock in order and not a wrinkle in her artificial silk stockings.
'David's doing the Lambeth Walk,' she said primly.
'Oi,' responded Miss Loveapple mechanically. 'Elsie, I am waiting for a trunk call. If it is favourable, we shall have to be busy. I must pack for Switzerland to-day—and you must make a copy of the London house inventory.'
Although it was a coveted job, for Elsie was proud of her neat handwriting, the girl looked glum.
'Won't you take us with you?' she asked.
'No, Elsie,' replied Miss Loveapple. 'You'd have to go into quarantine.'
'Yes, madam. Will you be away for long?'
'About three weeks. But I will ask Miss Pitt to call and see if Scottie and David are keeping fit. Captain Brown will advise you about the flowers and if there are any vegetables to spare the rector will be glad to distribute them. You see, you will have no worry. And I know I can trust you to carry on.'
'Thank you, madam.'
Elsie understood the position perfectly. Notwithstanding the fact that her mistress professed perfect trust in her, a village C.I.D. with trained sporting instincts would be on her trail.
