Death Knocks Three Times (8 page)

“I told the proprietor I had a friend coming down and should require privacy to discuss personal afiEairs, and he put this room at my disposal.”

“I mentioned to your nephew, when I realized his identity, my object in coming down here today,” acknowledged Miss Pettigrew. “Or shall I say one of my objects? Do you mean, Clara, there have been more letters?”

“A truly significant one at last. Up to the present I had refused to take the matter seriously. The world is full of halfwitted people who think this sort of activity a joke.”

“A joke in very poor taste, Clara, you will agree.”

“My dear Frances, the taste of most people is deplorable. Here is the latest—effusion.”

She opened her large black-velvet reticule and cast down a slip of paper on which was printed:

Make the most of your next birthday. Miss Bond. It will be your last.

“A definite threat, as you see.”

“A climax, perhaps,” amended Miss Pettigrew. “Have you the others, Clara, or did you think them beneath contempt?”

“I kept them, naturally. It is never possible to forecast how a matter like this will turn out. I have them here.”

There were three notes leading up to the climax; all were roughly printed on cheap, lined paper, all were undated and unsigned. The first read:

This is her aniversary. How are you Reeling now?

and had arrived on the unfortunate Isabel’s birthday. The second ran:

The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God. There shall no torment touch them.

The words “righteous” and “diere” were heavily underscored. Indeed, in one place the pen had actually penetrated the paper.

“When did these come?” inquired Miss Pettigrew, without looking up.

“I have no note of the exact dates. The first, of course, arrived on her birthday. The second came about a month later. Then there was a time-lag—I think that is the correct expression. Then—say two months later, came a third.

Do you remember how she hated the dark? It must be very dark where she is now.

“Surely that helps us,” exclaimed John.

“In what way, may I inquire?”

“It proves that the letters aren’t written by some malicious person out to make trouble, but by someone who did actually know Aunt Isabel. For instance, it would be easy for any one to know the approximate date of your birthday. Aunt Clara, because it was always a fete day. I always came down …”

“A fete indeed,” murmured Miss Pettigrew ironically.

John ploughed on, pretending he hadn’t heard. “A special cake was baked, and Stroud, who made it, always had it on show the day before. He liked to show what people could do even in wartime. But Aunt Isabel’s birthday can only have been known to her own immediate circle.”

“Let us get this quite clear, John,” said Aunt Clara in a deceptively pleasant tone. “You suggest that I wrote these letters to myself?”

“Of course not.” He sounded genuinely shocked.

“Then that eliminates one suspect. Now, who else could have the necessary information? There is yourself, of course, but then all the letters were left by hand, so that would involve your paying surprise visits to Brakemouth, and it is too much to believe that no one would have remarked a well-known novelist in our midst. That leaves—let me see—Locket. Or perhaps you and she had a pact.”

“Aunt Clara, this is absurd.” John found his voice with an effort. “Locket isn’t even in Brakemouth now. She went to her brother in Wiltshire.”

“That didn’t last long. She was back in three months. The brother was marrying again.”

“Within three months? Surely a scandal, my dear Clara.”

“According to Locket it would have been more of a scandal if he hadn’t married. But really, Frances, I cannot concern myself with the private lives of these people.”

“Then she is actually in Brakemouth now?”

“I believe so.”

“You must be sorry you left Seaview, aren’t you?” Like any stoic of old, John opened his breast to his adversary’s spear. “I mean, it was because of Locket leaving that you felt you couldn’t keep the house going.”

Clara looked at him like a particularly vicious boa constrictor eyeing a particularly inferior rabbit.

“My dear John, your memory is lamentably short. I told you at the time that my sole reason for maintaining a house and a stafiE at considerable trouble and expense was on account of your Aunt Isabel. She would never have adapted herself to hotel life, but when at last—at last—I could consider my own interests, I was thankful to be able to shelve all that responsibility and leave the management of a household to others. As for Locket, I should not dream of re-employing her even if she asked to come back. The way she went around after my sister died, talking about the house being haunted, hearing voices and Isabel crying at the windows— sheer hysteria, and so I told her. Really, I can hardly blame her brother if he did marry again at injudiciously short notice. It was like having a madwoman in the house. Pull yourself together. Locket, I told her, or you’ll end up in an asylum.”

“She was very fond of Aunt Isabel,” John protested.

“Are you suggesting / was not fond of her? If you knew the sac* rifices I have made all my life, first my father, then you as a helpless child abandoned by your parents—no, John, no argument if you please—and then all those years my sister, who was manifestly incapable of managing her own life. Oh, Frances, I know you were prepared to relieve me of that burden, but it was impossible. No one but I knew how it must be carried, I and my father who left me Isabel as part of his legacy on his death-bed. As for Locket, when I heard she was back I recommended her to Lady Trevanion, who, I knew, was looking for a housekeeper. She’s not perfect, I

told her, but which of them is? At least she’s clean and honest, and she doesn’t ask the outrageous wages of these young women with their hair flying on their shoulders and fingernails looking as though they’d been dipped blood. But would Locket go? Dear me, no. She had tasted independence. She was never going to live in again. She ‘obliges,’ I understand, a number of residents, but really I can tell you nothing definite about her. Do I understand you to suggest that she may have written these letters?”

“It’s a possibility, Clara,” said Miss Pettigrew, in her deep voice. “She had the necessary knowledge—about Isabel’s fear of the dark, for instance. All her friends were aware of it, but would a stranger be likely to know?”

“My point precisely,” chimed in John eagerly, feeling himself one of that blessed band of brothers of whom Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion are shining lights.

“Locket might talk, she was a great chatterbox. And then Isabel was highly indiscreet. She had an unfortunate habit of entering into conversations with strangers in omnibuses or in shelters on the sea-front. That was one reason why I was not anxious for her to go out alone. No one knows what she may not have said.”

“The word anniversary is spelt with a single ‘n’ which might argue an illiterate person. The printing, I dare say, is deliberately malformed. If the writer is someone known to yourself …”

“I doubt if you can go much my the spelling,” demurred John, “Plenty of fellows with a Varsity education might spell anniversary that way.”

“A great pity their parents wasted their money, if that’s so,” said Clara. “You, of course, would not make that mistake, John, except deliberately.”

“As for maniacs,” continued John in dogged tones, “plenty of them take to religion, which could explain the text from the Bible.”

“So we are now assuming that the letters are written by a religious maniac? That considerably enlarges the field.”

“One thing that strikes me as odd,” for once John did not intend to be deflated by his alarming relative, “is that so far there’s been no talk of blackmail. What, then, is the motive behind the letters?”

“That surely is obvious. I am being warned that I am in danger.

The last letter, at all events, constitutes a threat against my life.”

“And the motive?”

Miss Pettigrew took up the tale. “It occurs to me that there may be a soupgon of truth underlying all this melodrama. For instance we are all aware of the coroner’s verdict, but did it never pass through your mind, Clara, as I must admit it did through mine, that perhaps Isabel’s death was not an accident?”

“You mean that she deliberately threw herself off the balcony? But that is absurd. John here will tell you that only a few days before this tragedy she was in the highest of spirits.”

“Ah, but that was a few days earlier. Supposing something had happened?”

“What should happen?”

“You were not in her confidence?”

“She told me nothing that has any bearing on her sudden death.”

“And you, Mr. Sherren?” Miss Pettigrew turned smartly on him.

“As I told Aunt Clara at the time, she gave me the impression she had made some new friendship. I can think of nothing else that would have made her so happy, or caused her to speak as she did about life being worthwhile after one had given up hope. And if anything had happened to—to crash that friendship, she might have felt desperate …” He paused, letting the silence finish the sentence for him.

“I agree with your nephew, Clara,” intoned Miss Pettigrew. “Shortly before her death I also received a letter from Isabel that was, in the words of the poet, fired with hope. The next news I had was that she was dead. But for an unfortunate attack of influenza I should naturally have attended the funeral, but business affairs have kept me in town ever since.”

“I noticed you had not visited Brakemouth since receiving the news,” acknowledged Miss Bond with an acid smile. “Now, Frances, I should not say this unless Isabel were dead, but we can do her no harm now. Her whole life was one long series of hopes and disillusionments. She was perpetually making new and often quite unsuitable friendships on which she pinned the most absurd hopes. She had, as you know, a nature at once romantic and uncontrolled, and she could not visualize a normal end to any of these casual acquaintanceships. A man had only to raise his hat to her for her to begin planning what she would wear at the wedding. Yes, John, that is true. I have had more trouble in the past than you have any conception of. She had a way of suggesting she possessed ample means, and she would give quite disproportionate sums to congenital beggars. Any one with a hard-luck story could engage her sympathies, and persons of that susceptible temperament are bound to be deceived again and again. As I told you just now, she had not confided in me, but when these baseless hopes of hers came to nothing, as was perpetually the case, she would be plunged into an abyss of despair, from which she only rose to clutch at some fresh acquaintanceship, some fantastic day-dream which could never, in reason, be translated into reality. It was because he knew of this instability of hers that my father left his money as he did. Any unscrupulous person could have taken advantage of Isabel, and she might long ago have figured in one of these melodramatic criminal cases had she not had someone to look after her. I don’t say she was definitely unbalanced, but her balance was so delicate that she could never have managed her own life. And although naturally I have heard whispers as to the correctness of the verdict, I question whether any one so timid about heights would have chosen that way out.”

“Timid people are often desperate people,” said John in a worldly-wise manner. “They may act on impulse …”

“In any case, I see no sense in reopening this sad affair,” snapped Miss Bond.

“It is not left to you to reopen it,” returned Miss Pettigrew coolly. “The author of these,” she laid her long yellow finger on the anonymous letters, “clearly does not intend to let the matter rest. Had you thought of turning these over to the police?”

“Of course I have thought of it. It would be exhilarating to get some return for the exorbitant taxes we are called upon to pay. But surely you see the impossibility of such a course? If you and I and John here can suspect suicide, the police would be far more definite, and I cannot have dear Isabel’s memory smirched by such a suggestion made publicly. And I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that during those last weeks my sister’s attitude was painfully reminiscent of other occasions when she was, as it were, working up for a climax. Still, she was a woman fully grown, and at her age one looks for common sense.”

“On the contrary,” contradicted Miss Pettigrew, “hers was a very dangerous age.”

Miss Bond rose and walked over to the window. “We are like people going around in circles,” she said. “My real reason in inviting you here, Frances, is to ensure that you know the facts, and if the writer of these miserable effusions attempts to put his or her threats into force, you can communicate the truth to the police.”

“My own reading of the letters,” said Miss Pettigrew, “is that the writer means to apply the screw until he or she considers you in a sufficient state of—dither is, I believe, the word—to pay blackmail as the price of silence.”

“You are talking nonsense,” said Miss Bond contemptuously. “The greatest optimist cannot demand blackmail without some tangible weapon in the shape of documents or some kind of evidence, and I can assure you both that no such documents exist. Nor is any person in possession of information that could form a ground for such an illegal demand.”

“Perhaps he thinks you’re made of the same stuff as Aunt Isabel, and because she could be intimidated the same holds good for you.”

“In that case, he or she is certainly going to be disappointed,” announced Clara, sweeping the four bits of paper together and stuffing them back into her capacious bag in which she carried practically all her portable property, from her gold pencil to her sleeping tablets and sweet ration. She trusted no one, not even Miss Pettigrew or John, if the truth were known. “No, I shall await further developments. And now I believe I hear the luncheon gong. I had warned the management I should have one guest, but I dare say they will be able to support one more.”

Having made her nephew feel his lack of an invitation, she marched ahead of them into the dining room.