Weekend with Death (7 page)

“Henry, I can't!”

“My dear girl, you've got to. Don't be silly!”

“It isn't—you don't understand—if I get mixed up in a police case I shall lose my job. And I
can't
—because of Tinkler.”

Henry attempted to be soothing. It was not his happiest manner.

“My dear, there's really nothing to be afraid of.”

“I am
not
afraid!”

“There is no reason why you should be. You have only to ring up the police and answer a few simple questions. I don't suppose they will call you at the inquest. It is really only that you must have been one of the last people to see the poor woman. There is no question of your getting mixed up in a police case.”

Sarah's temper boiled over suddenly and fiercely.

“That's all you know about it!” she said, and banged the receiver back.

CHAPTER VIII

She had to do things to her face before she went back to the drawing-room. Even so, her colour was higher than it had any reason to be, and her eyes were much too bright. Joanna had an air of fretful impatience, but Morgan evinced an odious admiration.

“Well, well, Miss Sarah, that was a good long call. Convenient things telephones, aren't they?”

Sarah let a cold glance slide over him. She spoke to Joanna.

“It was Mr. Cattermole. He wanted to know if I had posted some letters.”

Morgan was slipping cards across the table. He laughed and said,

“Took quite a time over it too, didn't he?”

Sarah's anger had iced over. She said in her most indifferent voice,

“I had a call from a friend of mine. You must have heard the bell.”

Morgan picked up the cards.

“Oh, well, it's my deal,” he said.

When the evening was over Sarah, going up her attic stair, considered quite dispassionately that she had never endured a more disagreeable three hours or disliked anyone so much as she disliked Morgan Cattermole. Next time he came—if there was a next time—she would take a leaf out of Wilson's book and go away. He could hardly blame her for following his own example.

She came into her room and shut the door on the rest of the house with a feeling of relief. It was over. She became aware that she was very tired. She sat down on the edge of the bed and thought how nice it would be not to have to undress. She didn't feel in the least like undressing. How much better if you could just curl up like a dog and sleep when and where you pleased. It was much too much trouble to undress.

But as soon as she sat down all the things she didn't want to think about came crowding in. She didn't want them, but she couldn't bar them out. Planchette—Morgan's and Joanna's hands balancing—white fingers—brown fingers. Which of them had pushed the board? It seemed to be pushing them. But that was nonsense. Nothing and nobody was going to make her believe that it was the spirit hand of Mr. Nathaniel Garland, hanged for smuggling and the murder of a Preventive Officer in 1815, which had guided the scrawling pencil. Anger and disbelief welled up in her as she thought about it. Morgan was of course the obvious one to suspect. But Joanna had had these messages before. She had them when she was sitting quite alone. That cut Morgan out. Or did it? She wasn't sure. She thought it would take a lot of practice to make the thing write what you wanted it to. She swung back to the idea that the writing was in some way produced or at any rate influenced by Joanna—not consciously, but in some way that transmitted the thoughts which obsessed her.

This was, of course, a very reassuring explanation. It accused no one and it accounted for everything. Emily Case's name had got into the message because Joanna had seen it in the paper, and it had got mixed up in her mind like getting a fly mixed up with the currants when you were making a cake. What a perfectly revolting thought!

She got up from the bed and took off her red silk dress. The last thing on earth she wanted to do was to begin thinking about Emily Case. She hung the dress on a painted hanger with a lavender bag dangling from it—a Christmas present from Jessica Grey. The lavender was nice, but the dress slipped on the painted wood. Enraging to find your dress on the floor when you had hung it up.

Emily Case.

What was she going to do about Emily Case?

She went and stood against the foot-rail of the bed and looked at the drawer which held her pyjamas. One pair on the bed, waiting for her to put on. Three pairs in the second long drawer of the shabby bow-fronted chest with the broken inlay. And under the bottom pair the packet which Emily Case had put into her bag.

She went over to the door and put up her hand to turn the key.

There wasn't any key.

All in a moment Sarah stopped feeling tired. She opened the door and looked on the other side of the keyhole. She went down on her knees and searched the floor.

There wasn't any key.

Anger came up, and behind the anger fear. Because there had always been a key, and the key had been there last night. She remembered coming in—and locking the door—and getting Emily Case's packet out of her bag—and putting it back inside the bag at the bottom of the pile of pyjamas in that middle drawer. And this morning she had taken the bag, but she had left the packet under the pyjamas. And she had locked the door again then, so the key was not only there last night, it was there this morning. At 12.30, to be precise. The point was, where was it now?

There was no answer to that. Unless the fact that it wasn't in the door could be called an answer.

A bright flush of anger came up into Sarah's face. She pushed one of the solid Victorian chairs up against the door and wedged the handle. Then she opened her middle drawer and felt under the pile of pyjamas for Emily Case's packet. As her hand was slipping in, she thought, “Suppose it isn't there.” She had been out of the house for two hours in the middle of the day, and anyone could have taken it then. It was such a horrid thought that she stopped, her hand just touching the top of the pile.

Anyone could have taken it, but that meant someone in the house—Wilson, Joanna, Thompson, Mrs. Perkins, or Mrs. O'Halloran who came in to oblige from nine to one.

Sarah said, “Rubbish!” and something inside her said, “Who took that key?” She pushed her hand down to the bottom of the drawer and found the packet.

She put on her dressing-gown and sat down on the bed. Well, there it was, the horrid little object, about three by four in the way of inches, neatly sewn up on two sides with white linen thread. A man had been stabbed for it, Emily Case had been murdered for it, and Sarah Marlowe wished it very heartily at Timbuctoo. This being the kind of wish which relieves the feelings but produces no other result, Miss Marlowe set herself to think along more practical lines. She could ring up Henry Templar—she could ring up the police.… No, she couldn't. There was her job, and there was Tink.

If she could be sure that Henry wouldn't, as it were, hand her over to the police, Henry would do.

At this moment, with the clock close upon midnight, and the key of her room gone missing, Sarah wasn't feeling quite so haughty about Henry as she had done round about half-past nine. But there was nothing more certain than the fact that to ring up Henry would be practically synonymous with ringing up the police. It would be a complete climb-down, and before she knew where she was she would be telling a police inspector all about Emily Case.

There were, of course, other possibilities. She could send the packet anonymously to the Ledlington police, or to New Scotland Yard. She was rather taken with this idea. The only bother was, suppose the police were to track her down, it might seem rather a suspicious sort of thing for her to have done, because if they did track her—and at any moment one of the Cray Bridge porters might remember having seen her name on a label—well, the only possible line for her to take was, “I really haven't the slightest idea what this is all about.” She wouldn't tell any lies, but she wouldn't tell any more of the truth than she could help. If she had to tell them about the packet, well there she was, as innocent as the driven snow—“I found it in my bag, and I didn't know what to do with it”. Pure, beautiful truth without a speck on it. But if she had already posted the miserable thing anonymously to Scotland Yard, the truth wouldn't look so spotless—there is something furtive about an anonymous communication. It seemed to her that there was a case for compromise. She could mark time and see what happened. If the police came, there she was, all innocent, and they could have the packet. And if they didn't come, she could post it at Tooting, or Surbiton, or somewhere like that.

Sarah sat with her blue dressing-gown tucked round her and approved this plan. It was not perfect, but it would do. Anyhow she couldn't think of a better one.

Then all at once a dangerously bright idea came jigging into her mind. After all, people aren't stabbed or murdered just for nothing. The young man who had passed the packet on to Emily Case probably knew what was inside it. No, not probably—certainly. Emily Case may or may not have known more than she had told Sarah, but Sarah Marlowe meant to know what was in that packet before she did anything with it. If a thing is going to put you in the way of being murdered, you do have a right to know what it is all about.

As she picked at the stitches with her nail-scissors she reflected that she had a reel of strong thread in her work-box, and that she could sew the packet up again so that no one would know it had ever been opened. No need to unpick more than just the narrow end.

She peeled back the oiled silk and saw what she had expected to see, a wad of tightly rolled-up paper. Just for a moment she hesitated, and then she was unrolling it and spreading it out on her knee.

Flattened out, the wad was a manila envelope. There was nothing written on it, but it seemed to be full, and the end was firmly stuck down. She went into the bathroom, let the hot tap run, and steamed the shut end until it opened easily. Then back to her room again, with the chair against the door.

The envelope was full of papers. She pulled them out and sat down to look at them. There were sheets and sheets and sheets of thin paper covered with writing—very thin paper, covered with a small, neat writing. Names and addresses—just ordinary names and addresses. She turned the pages over, surprised and puzzled. Quite ordinary names. Quite ordinary addresses—London, Birmingham, Portsmouth, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, Plymouth, Woolwich.… Dozens and dozens of names, dozens and dozens of addresses all over England.… And a man had been stabbed and a woman murdered to prevent these names and addresses from reaching an unknown destination.

A shiver went over Sarah. There was someone who valued the possession of these lists so highly that he had done murder to get them. There was someone who was expecting to receive them. There was a young man who had been stabbed and who might or might not be dead. And there was Emily Case.

There was also Sarah Marlowe.

As she turned the pages over, a photograph slipped out and lay against a fold of her blue gown. It was a snapshot, and it had been taken with a good modern camera. It showed a man coming out of a house with his hat tipped back and an attaché case in his hand. Every line of the picture was hard and clear. There was a bald forehead with the hat pushed back off it, a large smooth face with all the contours rather flat—an expressionless face, heavy and hairless. Unpleasant without any especial reason. Perhaps it was the lack of hair. There were no eyebrows or eyelashes to be seen, no sign of hair on lip or chin. This, and the unsparing clarity of the photograph, gave an effect of nakedness. Sarah had a flash-back to a family of young pink pigs. She could think of nothing else as bare as this man's face.

She turned the snapshot over and saw that there was writing on the back. Not the hand of the addresses—a bolder one. The writing was in pencil.

“Paul Blechmann, alias Paul Black.”

That was on a line by itself. Below, in a scrawl which ran diagonally across the paper,

“Pretty sure he's the boss.”

Somewhere down in the house a clock struck twelve. The strokes had a faint, lingering sound. Between the first stroke and the last Sarah had made up her mind what she was going to do. Before the last stroke had died away she was tense, keyed up, busy, all her indecision gone.

Queer to spend thirty hours not knowing which way to turn and what to do, and then all of a sudden to be quite, quite sure. It was like a load off her mind. She felt light, and free, and eager again. All her movements were quick and controlled. She came and went in the room. She threaded a needle with the steadiest of hands. A good thing she had the right sort of thread—you must have strong linen thread for the buttons on your canvas shoes. It matched the original thread exactly, and she had a fitful moment of wondering whether the original thread had been bought for some girl's shoes, and who that girl might be.

She finished sewing up the packet and cut the thread. There was an inch or two left. She struck a match and burned it, and smeared out the ash upon the carpet by the bed. With the needle back in her work-box and the scissors on the dressing-table, no one could ever know that she had opened the packet and sewn it up again.

She had pushed it back under the pile of pyjamas, when something made her look round. If it was a sound it was a very soft one. She could not have said that she had heard anything, but in the act of pushing home the drawer she turned her head towards the door and saw the handle move. At once her mind was cold and clear. She shut the drawer, stepped back from it, and said,

“Who is there?”

There were only four people besides herself in the house. Mrs. Perkins and Thompson slept in the basement.

If it was Morgan—well, in that moment of cold anger she felt quite capable of annihilating Morgan.

CHAPTER IX

It wasn't Morgan. It was Joanna.