The Breaking Wave

by Nevil Shute

  I asked, “Did you hear anything unusual last night, Annie?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing at all.”

  She paused for a moment, and then opened the door and switched the light on, and we went into the bedroom. It was a bare room, with white paint on the woodwork and cream water paint upon the walls. It was furnished adequately but simply with a cheap bedroom suite of Australian hardwood, consisting of a bed, a chest of drawers with a mirror on it, and a wardrobe. In addition there was a table and a chair. On the bed a sheet was stretched over the dead girl.

  On the table was a small, folding, travelling alarm clock of an American make, and a bottle of fountain pen ink. With letters and documents in the forefront of my mind I unscrewed the top of this bottle; the top came off readily, the bottle was half full. I turned to Annie. “Had she got a pen?” Instinctively I spoke in a low tone, as if in a church.

  “Aye,” she said. “I saw a pen in her bag.” She opened the left hand small drawer of the chest of drawers and took out rather a worn, fairly large bag of dark blue leather. She opened it, and picked out the pen. It was a Parker 51, dark blue in colour, in good condition; the ink was still fresh in the nib. It had been used for writing very recently.

  I put it back in the bag and examined the remainder of the contents. There was a compact, a purse with a little money in it but no papers, and the usual things that a woman carries round with her, a comb, a lipstick, three keys on a ring, a clean handkerchief that had evidently been there for some time. There was nothing to be learned from these. I glanced at the contents of the drawer, mostly handkerchiefs and stockings; they conveyed nothing to me. I came back to the purse and opened it again. “What did she do with her money?” I asked in the same low tone. “This isn’t all she had?”

  “She had a savings bank account in the Post Office, Mr. Alan. She’d go to Forfar once in a while and pay her money in.”

  “Where’s the book for that?” I asked. “Is that here?”

  She shook her head. “I would say no. I have not seen it, Mr. Alan, and I was here when the police made the search.”

  “Do you know how much she had in the bank?”

  She shook her head. “I do not.”

  There were three books on the chest of drawers, but they told me nothing except that her tastes were catholic; The Last Days of Hitler was sandwiched between Anne of Green Gables and Hocus Pocus. I looked for a Bible or a Prayer Book, and found neither. Annie asked, “Do you want to see the clothes, Mr. Alan?” and put her hand on the first drawer.

  I shrank instinctively from the intrusion. “There’s nothing there, is there? You’ve turned them over?”

  “Aye,” she said. “The police, they went through everything very carefully.”

  “Leave them be,” I said. I turned from the chest of drawers and looked around the room. Two suitcases lay one on top of the other in a corner. I moved over and examined them. Both were old and one was in an unfamiliar style, probably foreign, but both were empty and without labels. “Is this all the luggage she had?” I asked.

  Annie hesitated. “I think it is,” she said. “I’ve been wondering, perhaps there should have been another. I mind she had to make several journeys when she came here first, carrying her luggage from the outside door up to this room. She wouldn’t want to carry more than one of these up the stairs, one at a time. Maybe she went up and down twice only. It’s a while ago since she came, and I was cooking at the time and didn’t notice her particularly.”

  “You didn’t come in here much?”

  She shook her head. “I never went into her room, Mr. Alan, nor she into mine. The mistress, she comes round once in a while and looks in at the rooms, to see that everything is tidy and kept nice.”

  I stood looking round the room; there was little more to examine. The room was fitted with a wash basin with running water, and here the soap and the toothpaste were of normal brands. The Eno’s and the Veganin were on a shelf nearby, but there were no medicines in evidence, and practically no cosmetics or lotions, which seemed to me unusual for a woman’s room.

  There was nothing to stay for, nothing to be learned. I moved towards the door. Annie paused by the bed, and said in a low tone, “Would you want to look at her?” Her hand moved towards the sheet.

  I shook my head; there was nothing to be gained by that, and we had done enough intruding. “Leave her be. There wasn’t any locket, or anything under the pillow?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing of that, Mr. Alan. We looked carefully, when the police were here.”

  I went out into the corridor and she followed me. “Well, thanks, Annie,” I said. “It’ll be a good thing when all this is over and we can get back to having things normal.”

  She nodded. “Aye. It’s been upsetting for everybody. Your parents must be very glad to see you home again.”

  I nodded. “I’m glad I came in time to help them out with this.” I paused. “Well, good night, Annie. Thank you for showing me.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” she said. “Good night, Mr. Alan.”

  I went through the swing door to the main house and my own bedroom. The fire was low; I threw on two or three logs and went downstairs at my slow pace, to get a whisky and to look around the house a little before going up to bed.

  I poured myself a drink and went and stood in front of the dying embers of the drawing-room fire, in the silence of the house. I was still glad to be home again, glad to be taking up the work that was my proper job, that I had spurned five years ago, but my pleasure was swamped and tempered by this matter of the dead parlourmaid, so that I could think of nothing else. In this comfortable, homely atmosphere there had been a deep and secret trouble that nobody had known anything about, so deep that it had led a girl who seemed to have been normal and balanced in her mind to take her own life. It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime. Nothing like this had ever happened there before, and it was disturbing that it should have happened now. Was something very wrong in all these easy, comfortable surroundings, something that nobody suspected, something that we none of us knew anything about? I felt that I would very much like to know the answer to that one. In fact, it was my duty to find out.

  I could not put my mind to the affairs of the property; I could think of nothing but this trouble. What curious impulse had it been that had led this girl to burn every scrap of evidence of her identity, to burn even her bank book? Perhaps there was no money in her savings bank, of course; perhaps she had withdrawn all that she had and used it in some way. That would have to be checked by the police. By all accounts she had lived very quietly, spending practically no money. I knew approximately what wage she would have been getting; in fifteen months she might have saved two or three hundred pounds. What had happened to that? Perhaps the savings bank had made a transfer of her balance which would provide us with a clue. Was it a possibility that some solicitor, perhaps in Ballarat, might have a will? It was conceivable, though hardly likely, that she had made a will.

  How carefully planned, how deliberate it had all been; how certain she had been in all the movements leading to her death! Practically nothing that was personal to her was left behind. The passport—that could go into the fire; she would not need that again. Letters and papers—they could go, for she would be reading nothing more after tomorrow. Photographs and souvenirs—she would not need them now for she would have emotions no more to be stirred; into the furnace with them. The bank book—she would have no need of money for the journey she was setting out on; let it burn. She had cleaned out her life as one might clean out a house or a bed-sitting-room before leaving it, and having don
e so she had lain down to die. In any normal person some enormous emotional upset would have accompanied the sum of all these sacrifices, and yet apparently there had been nothing of the sort. By all accounts, if she had planned her death she had gone to it cheerfully, with a quiet and an easy mind. She had appeared unmoved to my mother and to Annie, though both had remarked that she seemed rather quieter than usual.

  The bizarre thought crossed my mind that if the sleeping tablets hadn’t worked she’d have been in a bit of a spot, having destroyed her passport and her bank book and everything else. If by some chance she had been discovered before the drugs that she had taken had proved fatal, if she had been rushed into a hospital and her life had been saved, she would have plumped straight from the sublime to the ridiculous and she might have had a lot of bureaucratic difficulties in getting hold of her money and in getting another passport. I smiled cynically and checked the smile, for after all the girl had been in deep and secret trouble and it was no laughing matter. But how certain she had been of death!

  How could she have been certain of her death? There are ways of committing suicide that really are certain, but taking sleeping tablets isn’t one of them. When you take sleeping tablets you go to sleep, and death, if it occurs, occurs several hours later. Even then, only a doctor experienced in the particular drug and in its effect upon a wide variety of patients could say with certainty that the dose she took would really prove lethal at all, or would prove lethal before she was found in the morning. Nothing I had heard indicated that this girl had any close or intimate knowledge of medical practice; she might conceivably have been a nurse at one time, but if so she had never betrayed the fact to my mother, who was an invalid.

  Everything that I had heard indicated that this girl was an educated, intelligent, and rational person. How could she possibly have been so sure of death as to get rid of everything by burning in the furnace? Surely it must have crossed her mind that suicide in the way that she proposed, though easy and pleasant, was by no means certain. She must have had some special knowledge of the drug, or she would not have destroyed her things.

  The whisky may have been responsible though I had not had very much, because the sentence came into my mind inverted. She would not have destroyed her things unless she had some special knowledge of the drug. She would have hidden them.

  She would have hidden them, so that she could regain them if, in fact, she survived the sleeping tablets. I had assumed after talking to Annie that she had burned everything in the central heating furnace, but there was not a scrap of evidence that she had done anything of the sort. With Annie in my mind, the question of the suitcase came forward again. Annie had been vaguely puzzled that there were only two suitcases in her room. Perhaps, in fact, there had been a third. Perhaps she had packed into that third suitcase all that she valued of her personal possessions and deposited it somewhere where she could get it if she did survive—in the baggage room of a railway station, for example.

  That wouldn’t work, because at Coombargana it would be impossible for her to get a suitcase off the place in privacy. No bus or other public transport comes to Coombargana or within five miles of us. She would have had to take it in to town in one of our cars or trucks. She could not possibly have taken a suitcase out of the house without someone noticing and commenting upon it, and no one had suggested anything of the sort. If she had hidden her belongings in a suitcase it would probably still be in Coombargana House; she would have had difficulty even in getting it down the stairs and out into the grounds without Annie noticing. It was at least a possibility that all the evidence that we were looking for was in the house with us.

  I poured myself another drink, a small one, and sat down in my father’s chair beside the dying fire. I never believe in dashing at things, and this needed thinking about. Suppose the girl had wanted to hide a suitcase in the house, where would she put it? It had to be where nobody would think of looking, somewhere accessible to her, where nobody would see her as she went to hide it.

  That seemed to mean the whole of the top floor. When Annie was in the kitchen or away the whole top floor of the house was hers to do what she liked with, for my parents seldom went up there now. Her case could be in any of the cupboards or closets, in any of the bedrooms. Downstairs would be far more difficult with Annie and my parents about. It would be difficult for her to take it out to one of the outbuildings, for the gardeners were frequently around or else the station hands; she could not count on being unobserved. But upstairs, on the bedroom floor of Coombargana House, she could definitely count on being unobserved at almost any time of day.

  If one were to take a look through the top floor of the house, where would one start? Where would she be most likely to hide a suitcase if she wanted to do so? There were the two empty servants’ bedrooms opposite her room and Annie’s; those, I knew, were used as lumber rooms or boxrooms now. A suitcase in amongst a pile of our own ancient, disused cases would lie there for years covered in dust, till in the future someone clearing out the room to send the contents to some jumble sale might find this one and puzzle over what was in it, when the very name of Jessie Proctor had been long forgotten.

  The more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that her belongings might be just across the corridor from her room. It was the rational and reasonable place for them to be.

  I left the drawing-room and made my way upstairs through the silent house. I looked in at my own room and put another log upon the fire, hesitated, and fetched a small electric torch from the dressing table; I never travel without one of those. Then I went into the corridor and passed through the swing door into the servants’ quarters, paused for a moment opposite the dead girl’s room to make quite sure that I was right, and opened the door on the opposite side of the corridor. My torch showed me the light switch, and I turned it on.

  It was a bedroom, a room with two beds, furnished sparsely as a servant’s room. This must be where they slept the married couple, when they had one. Except for the furniture it was completely empty; there were mattresses but no bedclothes on the beds. I opened the wardrobe door and all the drawers in turn and looked round for a cupboard, which wasn’t there. There was nothing in that room, at any rate.

  There was another bedroom, the one opposite Annie’s room. I went along the corridor and opened the door of that one. This was the room I remembered, the one used as a boxroom. There were beds dismantled and stacked by the wall, trunks, suitcases, garden furniture, deck and steamer chairs, beach umbrellas, curtain poles of an antique design, an old commode, spears, boomerangs, and woomeras, and all the junk that a country house accumulates throughout the years. I stood in the doorway looking at all this stuff, wondering where to begin my search.

  There was movement in the room behind me, Annie’s room, and a light switched on and showed under the door. I stood cursing and embarrassed in the door of the boxroom, till Annie came out of her room, dressed in a faded blue dressing-gown, with wisps of thin grey hair hanging to her shoulders. “It’s all right, Annie,” I said a little testily. “I was just taking a look in here.”

  She said, “Oh—I’m sorry, Mr. Alan. I heard a noise and wondered what it was.” She made a movement to withdraw into her room, and then she paused, and said, “Were you looking for anything in particular?”

  I hesitated. “It just crossed my mind that the girl might have had another suitcase, and that it might be in here.”

  “I do not think so, Mr. Alan,” she replied. “I looked in there this afternoon.”

  I stared at her; we had evidently been thinking along the same lines. “You did?”

  “Aye,” she said. “After the police went away it came into my mind she could have packed some of her things away and put them in this room. I had a good turn-out in here this afternoon.”

  “You didn’t find anything?”

  She shook her head.

  I glanced around the piles of junk. “Not amongst those suitcases?”

  She shook her h
ead. “I opened every one.”

  “Nothing in that cupboard?”

  “Only the candlesticks and lamps we used before the electricity.”

  “Did you look in those two trunks?”

  She nodded. “There’s only curtains in that one, and the other’s full of the colonel’s uniforms and tropical clothes. I took a good look through everything, Mr. Alan.”

  There was nothing, then, for me to do in there. I turned and closed the door behind me. “Very thoughtful of you, Annie,” I said. “It was just an idea I had.”

  “Aye,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing, that she might have left some of her stuff in there. I think she must have burnt it all, Mr. Alan.”

  “Maybe she did,” I said. I turned up the corridor. “Well, good night, Annie. Sorry I disturbed you.”

  “Good night, Mr. Alan.”

  I went back through the swing door to my room, disappointed, for I had expected to find something in the boxroom. It seemed to me to be by far the best hiding place for a suitcase on the top floor of Coombargana. I sat down in the long easy chair before the fire in my bedroom and lit a cigarette, and loosened one of the straps below my left knee which had been chafing me a little. I sat there smoking and wondering about places where a suitcase could be hidden, and then it seemed to me that possibly the boxroom wasn’t such a good place, after all. It was too obvious. Both Annie and I had thought of looking there after a very few hours. Perhaps she had been cleverer than that.

  It was conceivable that she had simply put her suitcase in one of the empty bedrooms, or even in my own room, working on the principle that a thing that is in practically full view is frequently overlooked. It did not seem a very likely one, but I got up and took my torch and made a tour of the top floor of the house, going into all the rooms and opening all the drawers and cupboards. It did not take me very long and it yielded nothing.

  There was only one other place, and that was in the roof. The possums used to get in to the roof of Coombargana House to nest when I was a boy, though the measures that my father had taken seemed to have defeated them and I don’t think we had had them in the house for a number of years. I had been up into the roof once or twice on possum hunts twenty-five years ago. It was reached by a trap in the ceiling of the corridor outside Helen’s rooms, ten or eleven feet above the floor, inaccessible without a ladder.