She Died a Lady (5 page)

Despite the padding of whisky, Alec was honestly startled. His face writhed up. He didn’t like this intrusion into his dream-world, and started to laugh at it: only to become serious again.

‘My dear doctor, don’t talk such rubbish! Kill me! I can see you don’t know my wife. No; but let’s face it. They aren’t planning to kill me. But I can tell you what they are planning to do. They’re …’ He broke off. ‘Where the devil is that draught coming from?’

There was, in fact, a very palpable draught creeping round our ankles from the direction of the dining-room. The swing door to the kitchen creaked sharply, but nobody came in.

‘I hope they haven’t gone out and left the back door open,’ fretted Alec, ‘with a light on in the kitchen. Any light on this cliff can be seen for miles out at sea. The wardens will be having a fit.’

I wasn’t thinking of the wardens.

It must have taken me only five or six seconds, laboriously as I have to move, to reach that creaking door.

The kitchen, large and white-tiled, was empty. On the white-enamelled table-top, held down by Rita’s empty glass, lay a tiny piece of paper hastily torn from the kitchen memorandum-pad. A damp breeze blew straight in my face from the back door, which stood wide open, pouring a blaze of light outside.

To seal up rooms, to close doors and draw curtains, becomes a nervous instinct always lying at the back of your mind like a phobia. Lights are more than an offence; they are a shouting crime. But, though I reached that door in considerable haste, I did not immediately close it.

Though past black-out time, it was not quite dark outside. Outlines swam in dimness. Nothing could be grown or cultivated here close to the cliff, but that large expanse of damp dark-red soil had not been left entirely bare. A few geometrical designs – Alec’s mathematical soul showed here – had been laid down in tiny white-painted pebbles. And, in the centre, the outline of a path some four feet wide had been indicated by the pebbles. That path led straight out in dimness to the cliff edge known as Lovers’ Leap.

Lovers’ Leap.

There was an electric torch, hooded in tissue-paper, on top of the refrigerator. My bad heart threatened some ugly things when I took the torch, closed the back door behind me, and stumbled down the two wooden steps.

It was just light enough, under a wet and smoky sky, to see the two lines of footprints even without the aid of the torch.

Those footprints began where the sparse grass died. Always damp, the soil had grown softer yet with rain. Out ran the ghostly lines of pebbles, out ran the footprints – one set firm and steady, the other lagging behind with slower steps. I started to plunge out over them. But you don’t forget, even in this state, thirty years of acting as an occasional police-surgeon. Your instinct pushes you, as it pushed me now; pushed me to one side, fiercely, to avoid those footprints.

I walked down beside the path to the edge of the cliff. Rita’s face went before me.

I haven’t a head for heights. They make me turn dizzy, and I want to jump. So I hadn’t the nerve actually to walk to the brink and peer over, as most people in this district so casually do. Dirt or no dirt, mud or no mud, I got down on my hands and knees. I crawled out to the hump of scrub-grass beside the place where the footprints ended, and put my head over.

The tide in these parts begins to go out about four o’clock in the afternoon. So it was coming in again now, barely covering the rock-fangs seventy feet below. I couldn’t see much except dim white flickers. But I heard its hiss and drag among the rocks. Damp and sea-air blew at me, feeling over my face and flattening down my eyelids.

Then I just lay there in the dirt, a heavy old man feeling useless and ill. Even now, lying safely on the ground, it scared me to look over. My fingers opened and I dropped the electric torch. I saw it turn over, a brief firefly light winking and dwindling, until it disappeared without sound or trace in the place where two human beings had gone.

Presently I crawled back like a crab. It was easier when you didn’t have that light-headed feeling of looking over a precipice, of being swung as though on cobwebs over nothing. The cliff was a sheer face of ribbed stone, as bare as your face. Their bodies wouldn’t have struck against anything until they landed. And, when they landed …

I got up and walked back to the house.

Alec was still in the living-room, standing by the table and pouring himself more whisky. He looked dreamy and vaguely pleased.

‘Did they leave the door open?’ he asked. And then: ‘Look here, what’s the matter with you? Where did you get all that dirt on you?’

‘You’d better have it straight,’ I told him. ‘They’ve gone crazy and thrown themselves over the cliff.’

Silence.

It took Alec some time to assimilate this. They used to bring children to me and say: ‘Now, foolish, don’t make such a fuss. You know Dr Luke won’t hurt you.’ And, because the child trusted me, it knew Dr Luke wouldn’t hurt. But sometimes you can’t help hurting, no matter how much you try; then you would see the child’s lower lip go down, and the startled way it looked at you in reproach just before the tears. And Alec Wainright, a drunken man past his best years, regarded me exactly like that.

‘No!’ he said, when he had finally realized the meaning of the words. ‘No, no, no!’

‘I’m sorry. There it is.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Alec almost screamed. He put down the glass, and it spun across the polished top of the table. ‘How do you know?’

‘Go out and look at the footprints. His footprints and hers. They go out to the edge of Lovers’ Leap, and they don’t come back. There’s a note on the kitchen table, but I didn’t read it.’

‘It’s not true,’ said Alec. ‘It’s a … Wait a minute!’

Alec turned round, lurching a little in his stiff joints. Steadying himself against the table, he made for the door to the main hall. I heard him going as fast as he could up the stairs. I heard him moving about in the upstairs rooms, opening and shutting doors or drawers.

Meantime, I went out to the kitchen, where I ran hot water to wash my hands. A brush was hanging up on a hook beside the stove; it was actually a shoe-brush, though I never noticed that at the time, and I tried to clean up my clothes with it. I was still at this work, patiently brushing, when Alec returned.

‘Her clothes are still there,’ he said through cracked lips. ‘But –’

Here he held up a key, making waggling gestures which conveyed nothing. It was an odd sort of key, on the Yale pattern but much smaller; on its chromium head you could see the tiny engraved word
Margarita
, with a true-love knot.

‘Don’t go out there!’ I said, as Alec started unsteadily for the back door.

‘Why not?’

‘You mustn’t mess up the tracks. Alec, we’ll have to get the police.’

‘Police,’ repeated Alec, not certain of the word. He lowered himself into a white chair by the kitchen table. ‘Police.’ He tasted the word again; and then, as is usual in such cases, became frantic. ‘But we’ve got to
do
something! Can’t we … you know: go down there?’

‘How? Nobody could climb down that cliff. Besides, the tide’s coming in. It’ll have to wait until morning.’

‘Wait,’ whispered Alec. ‘Wait. But we can’t just sit here!’ He focused his wits. ‘You’re right. The police will know what to do. Ring up the police. Or I’ll do it.’

‘How can we ring up the police? Somebody’s cut the telephone-wires.’

Stayed by the recollection of this, he put up a hand to his forehead. His complexion, between whisky and emotion, had a mottled look very unpleasing to anybody’s eye: especially the medical.

‘But we’ve got a car,’ he pointed out. ‘We’ve got two cars. We could drive in and –’

‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do, if you feel strong enough.’

Startlingly, the electric refrigerator began to hum in that sedate kitchen. Alec, as he swung round to find the cause of the noise, noticed for the first time that little slip torn from the kitchen memorandum pad, scribbled on with a pencil, and left under the glass on the table. He removed the glass and picked up the paper.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I still can’t believe this. It’s all …’ But his eyes filled with tears nevertheless.

I had to get him his hat – he is as helpless as a child in these matters – and a raincoat in case the rain started again. He insisted on going out to look at the footprints with the aid of another electric torch. But there was nothing to see except the footprints, and only images of Rita crowding back on both of us.

He seemed to be holding up well, despite his physical condition. It was not until we were out in the front hall, on our way to the car, that he collapsed beside the hat-stand in a dead faint. The little key, engraved with the name
Margarita
and the true-love knot, dropped out of his hand and fell on the hardwood floor. I had never guessed how very much he loved Rita, but I guessed then. I picked up the little key and put it in my waistcoat pocket. Then I set about the task of getting Alec upstairs.

*

The bodies of Rita Wainright and Barry Sullivan were recovered two days later. They were washed up on a shingle beach a few miles down the coast, and some small boys ran to fetch the police. But it wasn’t until the post-mortem that we learned how they had really died.

T
HAT
was the day I first met Sir Henry Merrivale, under circumstances that will long be remembered in Lyncombe.

War or no war, the village could talk of little but the suicide pact of Rita Wainright and Barry Sullivan. It angered me. Very little sympathy was expressed for either of them, especially Rita. The general trend of it was: ‘Wouldn’t you know she
would
do a damn silly theatrical thing like that?’

On the other hand, Alec got no great shakes of sympathy himself.

‘’E ought to ’ave walloped ’er,’ said Harry Pierce at the ‘Coach and Horses’. ‘Then she wouldn’t ’a’ done it.’

I failed to see the logic of this. Besides, too much talk of walloping wives is done by those who would never have the nerve to utter a large-sized boo to their own particular spouses: as, for example, Mr and Mrs Pierce. It was all the more irritating because Alec’s collapse had been rather more serious than I had feared. A trained nurse was with him day and night, and Tom went out to see him twice a day.

On Monday morning before lunch, having been confined to the premises by strict orders of Tom, I was taking the sun in our back garden when Molly Grange came round to see me. She walked down the path between the tall blue delphiniums, to the open space under the tree where the wicker chairs stand.

‘How are you feeling, Dr Luke?’

‘I’m perfectly fit, thanks. What has that idiotic son of mine been telling you?’

‘That you’ve been – exerting yourself.’

‘Nonsense!’

Molly sat down in a wicker chair opposite me.

‘Dr Luke. It’s a dreadful business, isn’t it?’

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘You knew Barry Sullivan, didn’t you? In fact, you were the one who introduced him to …’

I bit my tongue, hoping there were no unpleasant memories. But Molly did not seem to mind. People at first glance seldom realized how attractive Molly was. Like most fair-haired, blue-eyed girls who do not apply make-up so that their faces may be known, like ships, by their markings, Molly seemed ordinary.

‘I didn’t know him very well. Only slightly,’ she said. She lifted one slim hand and examined the fingers. ‘But it’s a horrible affair just the same. Dr Luke – you don’t mind talking about it?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Well,’ said Molly, sitting up straight, ‘what
happened
?’

‘Didn’t Tom tell you?’

‘Tom’s not an awfully good story-teller. Then he just says: “Hell, woman, don’t you understand plain English?”’ She smiled, but her face grew grave again. ‘So far as I can gather, you and Mr Wainright were starting out towards the car, to go for the police, when Mr Wainright collapsed.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You dragged him upstairs and put him to bed …’

‘That didn’t hurt me.’

‘Tom says it might have. Anyway, what I can’t understand is this. Tom says you
walked
from “Mon Repos” to here. You walked four miles and more in the dark –’

‘It wasn’t completely dark. The stars came out when the rain cleared.’

Molly waved this aside.

‘And came back here,’ she said, ‘to telephone the police at Lynton. You didn’t get back until half-past eleven or going on for twelve. But there must have been two cars at least out there. Why didn’t you come in a car?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘there wasn’t any petrol for the cars.’

Molly looked bewildered. The memory of going out to that garage, and finding what awaited me there, had no soothing effect on the temper.

‘My dear Molly, somebody had turned the tap of the petrol-tanks and let it all run out. Both Alec’s car and mine. Even apart from the question of how scarce the stuff is, I can’t see the particular fun of a practical joke like that. Don’t ask me why anybody did it! Or why the telephone-wires were cut. But it was done. And I was stranded. What’s more, I left the house carrying a little souvenir-key that Alec sets great store by for some reason, and had to give it to Tom to take back to him. I left him very ill, but I had to get help somehow. Barring radio or carrier-pigeons …’

‘It was a silly thing to do,’ Molly admitted. ‘And at a time like
that
. You’ve no idea who did it?’

‘The diabolical Johnson could have done it. Anybody could have done it.’

‘Johnson?’

‘A gardener Alec sacked. But where was the sense?’

‘They haven’t found the – they haven’t found Rita and Mr Sullivan?’

‘No. Everything’s out of joint. Including you, now I come to think of it. Why aren’t you in Barnstaple this morning? How’s the typewriting bureau getting on?’

Molly pressed her lips together. She brushed her fingertips against her temple, seeming for the first time uncertain. Her ankles were set exactly together, as precise as a ledger in her workroom.

‘The typewriting bureau,’ she informed me, ‘will just have to take care of itself for a day or two. I’m feeling a bit under the weather myself. Not ill. Just –’ She dropped her hand. ‘Dr Luke, I’m worried. I didn’t really like Rita Wainright, you know.’