Four Strange Women (35 page)

I had to listen.

It's strange to have to lie still and listen while one woman tells you how another means to kill you as she killed those others, too.

Always when she had finished she made herself more tea and then began again—right from the beginning.

You see, I couldn't speak or move.

It was like that all through the night.

You see, I couldn't speak or move.

I had to listen.

When it was day she washed the cup and saucer she had been using and put away the tea pot, and then she went away herself.

She said she would send someone to let me loose.

She came back and said very likely I didn't believe her, and if I didn't, she didn't care. I had to be told so as to have a chance to save myself and I could believe her if I liked, or I could disbelieve her and die—like the others, like her husband.

All one to her, she said.

She said her job wasn't me, it was something else.

She went away again then and I lay and thought and thought till Bobby Owen came, the police johnny. She had sent him. He wanted to know all about it. I told him it was a practical joke. He didn't believe me. I didn't care. All I wanted was time to think. God, how I wanted to think.

Only I couldn't.

You see, I knew it was all true, every word, only it didn't seem real. It seemed a truth about other people, another world. Like watching a play of marionettes that had nothing to do with real happenings.

I had arranged to meet Gwen at the Savoy for dinner. I felt rather jolly and high spirited. She noticed that. She said something about my being fey, but I hadn't had anything to drink. I told her so, and she said if I wasn't fey, then I ought to be.

It's strange to sit at dinner and watch across the plates and flowers the woman you know has made her plans to kill you.

It all happened as she had said—the other woman, I mean.

Gwen was never more—I don't know any word to describe it. She pulled you right out of you—if you see what I mean. The other woman said: ‘She is a vampire, she feeds on men.' That was true. Unless she was sucking the life out of a man, she couldn't exist. That night I could almost feel her feeding upon me, and it was as though she fed till there was nothing left of me.

That's what I had been told all the night long.

All the night long I had been told, and it was so.

She took me to her own place in Camden Town I had never known about before—one of a terrace of empty houses that are to be pulled down when the lease runs out. Most of them are empty, but she had rooms in one of them. She only took you there when it was the end, when she didn't mind letting you know because you were never to know anything else.

I let her do what she liked. It didn't matter. I went the whole way with her. Why shouldn't I? You see, I knew how it was meant to end—what she meant and what I meant, now I had been told, told all through a long night, over and over and over again.

Next night we started off again, in my big car. I drove. She told me we were going where last night would seem nothing, nothing, nothing compared with what was waiting for us.

She told me where to drive and when we had gone a long way she told me to stop.

There was a hamper in the car with food and wine, a bottle of wine. Only not the bottle she thought because I had changed it.

Not difficult, because she never even thought of suspecting anything.

I was watching though, and I saw her pour away her own glass of wine but I drank mine.

She watched me while I drank, and she smiled a little only, you see, what I drank, it wasn't from the bottle she had prepared.

It is strange to drink the wine a woman has poured out that she thinks will kill you, while all the time she sits and smiles, and sometimes whispers a word or two about what presently you are to share together; other whispers too, whispers about love—of one side of love, I mean, the only side she knew.

When she thought my senses were gone and the drugged wine had acted, she started the car. Then she slipped out of one side and I slipped out of the other, and I lay quiet in the bushes while the car went over the edge of the pit opposite where we had stopped, where she had told me to stop.

It was late and very dark. I lay there quite still, under the bushes in the dark, and she came to the edge of the pit, very carefully, for fear of falling, and when she was right at the edge she stood there and laughed.

I don't know how long it was she stood there, laughing to herself.

It seemed a long time but perhaps it wasn't.

I lay very still. The bushes hid me and the night and I never moved. I might have been dead—like those others. I think sometimes I thought I was. I think I saw her dancing. I am not sure. I could see her against the skyline and it is in my mind that I saw her dancing as she laughed.

But I am not sure. It was like watching a marionette show. It didn't seem real. It didn't seem real that I was dead, though I thought perhaps I was.

It is very strange to lie and watch a woman laugh and dance, because she thinks that you are dead and she has killed you.

She had a bicycle hidden somewhere near. She rode away on it, very silently and swiftly, and I came home again.

There was a letter on my table. Gwen's engagement ring I had given her was lying near. The letter was in my writing and had my name to it. But I had neither written it nor signed it. It said that now Gwen had found out I was deceiving her with another woman and had sent back her ring, I had nothing left to live for and so I was going to commit suicide.

It was a good letter. The writing was just like mine, I could almost have sworn the signature was mine if I hadn't known it wasn't. No one would have had any doubts. They would have looked for me a long time; and when they found me under my wrecked car at the bottom of that old chalk pit, everything would have seemed perfectly simple and plain.

And Gwen would have been provided with a good reason, after such a tragedy, for leaving England for a rest and a change of scene and to get away from talk. Every one would have felt sorry for her, and in America she would have been able to start fresh.

That's all.

Except that there wasn't only the letter waiting for me. Becky Glynne was there, too. She had been rung up, just as she had been once before. The other time was in case Bobby Owen didn't come. This time she was told she was to, make sure I was all right.

It's Becky who has made me write all this. I didn't want to, but she said I must and so I did.

The first thing Bobby did when he had finished reading this long document was to ring up the Yard to say that he was bringing it to them for their information and action. Then he rang up Lord Henry's flat, but got no reply, and when he tried the manager's office he was merely told that Lord Henry Darmoor was away and had not said when he would return. An attempt to get in touch with Becky Glynne was equally unsuccessful.

Annoying, for though Bobby did not doubt a word of Lord Henry's statement, which indeed told him no more than he had long suspected, he knew the Yard would want personal confirmation. To the Yard it had to be shown at once, however, and there after it had been examined it was considered to provide sufficient ground for action. Inquiries were sent out for Lord Henry and for Becky, as well as for Gwen Barton. Every place that could be thought of was visited, every person believed to be likely to know anything about any one of them was questioned.

Without result. All three of them had vanished utterly without trace. A phone call put through to Cardiff brought presently the reply that Mrs. Reynolds was selling sweets and cigarettes as usual in her sister's shop. It was understood she had been in bed two or three days with a touch of influenza, and certainly she looked ill enough, pale and drawn.

“I wonder if she saw a doctor,” Bobby mused, but did not think the point sufficiently pressing to be worth at the moment any further inquiry.

Cardiff was asked, nevertheless, to keep an eye on her, and if she showed any symptoms of departing, to arrest her on any charge they could think of, assault, theft—she had helped herself to Lord Henry's tea, for instance—unlawful entry, anything so long as she wasn't allowed to slip away.

It all took time, and mostly, it appeared, wasted time. One paragraph, however, in Lord Henry's statement had mentioned that Gwen used occasionally rooms in the Camden Town district, in a row of otherwise unoccupied houses destined shortly to be pulled down when certain leases expired.

An urgent message to the Camden Town police brought the information that there were in the district two or three such blocks of houses waiting for demolition, but that houses in Mop Brow Terrace seemed likely to be those required, since one of them was known to be in occasional use by a lady who lived in the country but sometimes spent a day or two there when visiting town. Nothing was known about her, there had been no reason for inquiry, talk in the neighbourhood was merely to the effect that a woman had been seen entering one of the houses, and that local tradesmen occasionally delivered supplies. It was known, too, that the water and electricity charges and so on were paid—paid by money order in the name of George Burton.

To Mop Brow Terrace set out therefore two police cars; the first containing the chief constable himself, for even that dignitary was growing interested, a superintendent to take the responsibility, an inspector to do the work, and Bobby, trying to remember that he, too, was now an inspector, if only of a provincial force, and therefore entitled to feel quite at home, even in such exalted company. The second car contained technical experts, the finger-print and photograph men, and two uniform men who might be required, since a common or garden policeman in uniform often makes more impression than even a chief constable in mufti. Mr. Findlay, of the Public Prosecutor's Department, was asked over the phone if he would care to accompany the party, but cautiously declined on the ground that the Public Prosecutor's Office was not an office of investigation. Their work only began when all possible facts had been collected, then their job was to consider them and to prepare the case for presentation in court.

“Besides,” he had added, “you'll find the bird has flown and the nest empty. The lady knows when to declare and when to pass—especially when to pass.”

In this, however, Mr. Findlay was wrong in part, and he has always felt that even the bridge at his club with visiting experts, which, as a psycho-analyst might have guessed from his use of the card metaphor, was the real cause of his refusal, was hardly worth what he missed.

Darkness had already fallen when the two cars drew up in Mop Brow Terrace before a row of five houses, presenting as derelict and dismal an appearance as can well be imagined. They had been used for what is known as ‘fly' bill posting. Chalk inscriptions had been scribbled on their walls. Windows were boarded up on the ground floor, on the upper floors they showed thick with the grime of years and often displayed broken panes as well. The woodwork had gone unpainted for so long that in places no paint was left and the bare wood showed signs of beginning to rot. In the areas, dead leaves, dirty paper, and so on, had accumulated. Only one sign of use and occupation was visible and that only to the observant eye. The door of the central of the five houses had a Yale lock that had plainly not been in position for long.

Knocking produced no answer. One or two passers-by informed them that no one was living there. The information was received without gratitude, but the chief constable began to be nervous lest a crowd should assemble. It doesn't take much to cause a London crowd to collect and all police have an ingrained dislike of crowds. Incalculable things, crowds. So he sent two of the party round to have a look at the back. They returned to report it even more securely fastened up than was the front. So then he reluctantly produced the search warrant with which he had provided himself, and said to Bobby:—

“Carry on.”

Bobby went back to the car and found the jemmy they had brought with them. He inserted it between door and door post. The lock held but the unpainted woodwork soon gave way. Bobby pushed the door back and they all went in.

“Try to find a switch, the electricity should be on,” said the chief constable.

The switch was soon found, but no answering light responded, for the very good reason that there was no bulb.

They had brought police electric lamps and by their light saw an unfurnished hall, the walls black with dirt, the floor boards uncovered and broken and splintered in more than one place. Plain traces of occasional passage along the centre of the hall to the foot of the stairs were visible. There were other stairs leading down to the basement, but cobwebs and dust gave proof that no one had recently gone that way. Bobby opened one or two of the doors near. They admitted into empty rooms where evidently no one had been for years.

“Try upstairs,” said the chief constable.

Their steps loud on the uncarpeted treads, echoing through the silent and deserted house, they ascended to the first floor, silent themselves as the silence around, for a foreboding of strange evil lay heavily upon them. On the landing they paused. Everything here was in the same condition. Cobwebs and thick dust, a broken banister rail, paper peeling from the walls, great patches of damp where water at one time had seeped through from somewhere, a general air of desolation and decay.

The chief constable looked round. Since he began to climb the ladder of promotion he had done a lot of reading and he was not averse from showing it. He said now:— “Fit place for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, eh?” Then he laughed nervously.

The superintendent said:—

“Fair gives you the creeps, don't it?”

The chief constable said:—

“That's what I meant.”