“Sorry to be late,” he murmured. “I’ve been packing my case.”
Mr. Hardstaffe looked up.
“You’re not leaving us, are you?” he asked hopefully.
“Oh, no. I’m going to London for a few days on business.”
“But I thought you were afraid of bombs,” remarked Mrs. Hardstaffe.
“Mother!” protested Leda, turning to Arnold with a look which seemed to say, “What else can you expect from her!”
“Well, I’m sure your father told me...”
“Rubbish!” snapped her husband. “Besides there haven’t been any in London for months. You’d better get back by Saturday,” he went on, putting his porridge plate on to the floor for the dogs to fight over. “We have a charming young guest coming to dinner.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” said Leda. “I think you might have asked me first. The food’s difficult enough without anyone extra, what with a ration book and a pink ration book and a yellow ration book. Who is it?”
“Miss Fuller.”
“Miss—?” Leda stared. “I thought you didn’t like having any of the teachers here. What’s the idea?”
“Don’t ask me,” replied her father. “Your mother invited her.”
“Mother! You?”
Mrs. Hardstaffe moistened her dry, colourless lips.
“Yes. Your father—that is—I thought that as she is leaving soon...”
Leda smiled.
“Oh, if she’s leaving...” she said, and left the sentence to hang in mid-air. “If you want to catch that train, Arnold,” she went on, pushing back her chair, and moving from the table, “you’d better get a move on.”
“Are you driving Mr. Smith to the station?” asked Mrs. Hardstaffe. “Can I do anything for you while you’re away?”
“No, no,” replied Leda hastily. “I’ll see to everything when I get back. You know you always upset them in the kitchen.”
“I hope I’m not taking you away from anything important by deciding to go so suddenly,” said Arnold, when he was sitting beside Leda in his car, some minutes later. “I could easily have left the car at the station for you to pick up later.”
“Nonsense!” laughed Leda. “You mustn’t take any notice of Mother. Her one ambition is to go into the kitchen and tell the maids to stop doing one thing and go and do something else. She doesn’t like to feel that I have the ordering of everything, but she’s too bone-idle to do it herself. They simply dread her going into the kitchen. And anyway, I should be an ungrateful wretch if I couldn’t spare half-an-hour with you. You’re always doing things for me.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Arnold, in his turn. “I shall miss you when I get up to Town.”
“Splendid!” was Leda’s gay reply. “There’s no danger of your forgetting to come back to us, then.”
“Rather not. Besides, I’ve got to finish my book, and you’re my inspiration, you know.”
Leda looked straight ahead without speaking, for a few seconds.
At length she said, quietly.
“I think that’s quite the nicest thing any man has ever said to me.”
“Oh, rot!” exclaimed Arnold in some embarrassment, for he had made the remark as a joke. “You must know dozens of people who pay you better compliments than that.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” she said, still serious. “Women don’t like me, and I scarcely know a dozen men. It’s quite true,” she went on, cutting short his polite protest. “My people are so difficult. Daddy scowls if a man looks at me —he’d be so lost without me to look after him. And Mother! Well, you can see for yourself how helpless she is. I haven’t had much chance to make many friends. You simply can’t realise what it has meant to me to have you to go walks with, and talk to. Oh, I’m not being sloppy, or anything like that. You know I’m not that kind of girl. I’ve thought, once or twice, that your own life must have been almost as quiet, that is, unless you’re married and want to keep it quiet for a bit.”
Arnold laughed.
“No, I haven’t got a wife up my sleeve,” he said. “And, in a way, you’re right about my life. I’ve certainly never met a woman I wanted to marry, and I’m afraid it’s a bit too late now. For one thing, she’d have to have plenty of money, and rich women are a bit difficult to find nowadays.”
Leda glanced at him quickly to see whether he was joking.
“You never know your luck,” she said. “As for being too late—well, you know what the song says, ‘When you fancy you are past love, it is then you meet your last love.”
“‘And you love her as you’ve never loved before! H’m, I wonder.”
“Well, here we are!” exclaimed Leda, as she brought the car to a standstill outside the station. “No time to wonder now: you’ll only just catch that train. You don’t expect me to come onto the platform, I hope. I can’t bear waving and shouting sweet nothings while the engine blows off steam. Good-bye. Take care of yourself, and come back soon.”
She turned the car and drove off, leaving Arnold to wonder whether he had imagined that her eyes were wet.
He chose a compartment, and, having settled in a corner seat, glanced in desultory fashion at the morning paper.
But he soon grew tired of this.
Reading the papers wasn’t much good nowadays, he thought. Once you’d listened to the wireless news, the printed words were just so much repetition, and the less official columns were given up to speculations about what Hitler might do next. As if everyone wasn’t so sick of the little house-painter that they’d ceased to care what he did!
He gave the paper to a rather forlorn-looking man opposite, who received it avidly. Then he folded his arms and began to think about Leda.
The stay-at-home daughter was not so common now as in his younger days, and this, he felt, was as it should be. It was a shame that a young, capable girl like Leda should have so few chances. Young? Well, she must be about thirty-two, he supposed, but that was considered the most attractive age for a woman in these enlightened times. Women no longer lived in Quality Street.
Yes, he might have considered marrying Leda if she had had money of her own: they were good friends, and what with his books and her dogs, they might make a great success of life together. He might have considered it, even, if she had been in the least attractive physically. But, after all, he hadn’t remained a bachelor for fifty years for the sake of a woman who hadn’t a jot of feminine charm, or what was known in the language of to-day as “oomph.” He wouldn’t mind making a fool of himself over one of those “devastating redheads” about whom he heard a lot, but had as yet never seen. But... Leda...! She wasn’t the sloppy kind, as she often declared, but she would at least expect him to kiss her....
No. Leda would have to have a good deal of money, he decided....
His thoughts turned to the murder of Mr. Hardstaffe.
He smiled as he wondered how the other occupants of the railway carriage would have received the information that he was plotting to exterminate one of their fellow creatures.
“Impossible!” they would say. “Why, he’s fifty if he’s a day, and such a mild inoffensive-looking little man. I don’t believe it!”
Oh, well! He was not the first mild little man of fifty to turn his hand to murder. There had been one, not so very long ago, named Dr. Crippen.
He had been studying the history of Crippen’s crime for some weeks now, and Lord Birkenhead’s words had seemed particularly applicable to himself.
“It seemed incredible,” he had written, “that the little insignificant man should have been capable of such an unusually callous, calculated and cold-blooded murder.”
For, allowing for the alliterative choice of words which he, as a writer, could fully appreciate, no better sentence could be composed to describe the murder which Arnold had planned in the early hours of this morning.
When the train drew slowly into Paddington Station, he had worked out the full details of that plan. It was so simple t
hat he laughed aloud in the taxi which took him to his modest club.
But he was not the only man who planned murder that night.
He heard the sinister wail of sirens as he stepped into his bath, but with the deliberate bravado befitting a potential murderer, he continued his toilet as if unmoved by the sound. Then came the barrage of guns.
He was knotting his tie in front of the bedroom mirror when he heard the whistle of the first bomb, and was in the bathroom when he heard the second, with no recollection of how he had got there. He flung up his arms in an instinctive movement to shield his head, and yelled aloud as the third bomb struck the building with a devastating cataclysm of noise.
He felt himself lifted up and dashed against the hideously shuddering walls, and knew no more.
CHAPTER 9
Ten days later, Arnold Smith found himself returning to Nether Naughton in a first-class carriage filled with third- class passengers.
This time he was not thinking of murder. He was entirely absorbed in wishing that the other people in the compartment would stop talking, especially the sailor in the corner who appeared to be determined to indulge in Careless Talk.
Arnold leaned back in the corner seat which an exorbitant tip had procured for him, and closed his eyes. His head ached, and he still felt rather dazed and unsure of himself.
He had only a vague recollection of his experience in Town. He had been in a building which was hit by a bomb, he knew, but after that, he had seemed to be living in a dream, in which things were not quite real.
But somewhere in his mind he was conscious of something which he could not remember, although he felt that it was important for him to do so.
As the journey lengthened, the crowd in the carriage thinned, until he was left alone for a blissful half-hour, and dozed until the train drew up at the tiny station of Nether Naughton.
He had telephoned to Leda the previous evening, to tell her of his expected arrival, but she had been out, and he had left a message with a maid. He gave up his ticket, and walked out through the station gates, expecting to see her at the wheel of his car. There was no sign of her or of anyone who might have brought a message. The thought of walking was distasteful to him, for the station was situated a mile away from the village, presumably so that its inhabitants should not be disturbed by the noise of the main-line trains.
The train had been an hour late, so he returned to the station to ascertain if Leda had called for him on time, and intended to call again later.
“Who, sir? Miss Hardstaffe, sir?” asked the station-master-ticket-collector. “Oh no, not to-day she hasn’t been. You wouldn’t hardly expect it, would you?”
Arnold stared at him.
“Well, yes, I did expect her,” he said abruptly. “She usually drives my car for me, and...”
The station-master looked at him more closely.
“Oh, it’s you, sir,” he said. “I didn’t notice you properly. You’ll be the gentleman who’s staying at the Hardstaffes’. Well, you couldn’t rightly blame her for not coming. Very sad, sir. Very sad. ‘From battle, murder, and sudden death,’ that’s what we say on our knees of a Sunday, but it comes to us all just the same.”
Arnold felt cold and apprehensive.
“Sudden death?” he asked. “At the Hardstaffe’s? Sudden Death! Not...?”
The station-master eyed him strangely, he thought.
“Why, haven’t you heard, sir? I’m sure I wouldn’t for the world have... but you being their friend... Yes, sudden death it was for sure. And,” he moved his head confidentially forward, “if you was to say it was murder, sir, it’s my notion you wouldn’t be wrong. No, you wouldn’t be wrong!”
It was then that Arnold remembered the elusive fact which he had felt to be so important.
He turned without another word, and made off as quickly as he could, leaving his suitcase standing on the ground, while the station-master lifted a bewildered forefinger and gave his forehead a significant tap.
CHAPTER 10
Arnold Smith passed the door of the constable’s modern concrete bungalow several times before he finally summoned enough courage to walk along the narrow path between the cabbages and onions in the front garden up to the green-painted door itself. In response to his knock, it was opened by Constable Files, looking singularly undressed without his peaked, flat-crowned hat.
“Good-evening,” he said in the cheerfully expectant voice which had sold many a ticket for Police Charity Concerts. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s rather important,” said Arnold, stammering a little. “Come in, sir.” He ushered Smith into a small, barely-furnished, well-scrubbed room on the right of the tiny hall. “My Superintendent’s here. You won’t mind talking in front of him, I daresay. Superintendent Cheam. Mr. Smith. This is the gentleman who is staying with the Hardstaffes, sir,” he explained, after having effected his introductions. “Glad to see you back again, sir. Miss Hardstaffe was quite worried at having no word from you.”
“I was—detained,” explained Arnold. “Well, as a matter of fact I bumped into the first raid London has had for some time. In a way, it has something to do with my visit to you now.”
He paused for a moment, then,
“I’ve come to give myself up for murder!” he said.
The Superintendent and the Constable exchanged quick glances.
“Perhaps you’ll sit down, Mr. Smith,” said Files, pushing forward a hard, wooden chair. “Now, murder, you say. Was that in London?”
“In London?” repeated Arnold impatiently. “Of course not. It was here, in the village. At the Hardstaffe’s.”
The Superintendent leaned forward.
“And who told you that there had been a murder in the village?” he asked.
“The station-master,” replied Arnold, adding in haste, “Of course, I knew about it before, or, at least I should have done if I hadn’t happened to get a knock on the head in the raid. After that, I felt muzzy for days, and although I thought I remained in London all the time, there was something I knew I’d done that puzzled me. As soon as I heard that there’d been a—a murder at the Hardstaffe’s I knew in a flash what had happened, so I came to give myself up at once. You ought to have no trouble in tracing my movements and getting the evidence you need to convict me.”
The Constable nodded.
“I see, sir. A blow on the head, you said. You must have had a pretty narrow escape. Perhaps you’ll tell us all you know about this murder.”
Arnold ran a sweating finger round the inside of his starched collar, then played with the heavy, engraved ring through which his tie was threaded.
‘It’s all a dreadful shock,” he said. “I’d made my plans for the murder and worked them out to the last detail; I admit that. But I never intended to murder Mr. Hardstaffe really. I only meant to write it all.” He noticed that the two policemen exchanged glances again, and he hesitated. “I’m afraid I’m not being too clear about this,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to ask a few questions.”
“No, that’s all right,” the Superintendent assured him. “Just tell us the story in your own way.”
Arnold smiled ruefully.
“That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” he remarked. “I’m certainly getting some first-hand information for my book now, but I’m afraid it will be too late to be of any use to me. You see, it’s like this. I’m writing a detective novel, and I’d cast old Hardstaffe as the victim and myself as the murderer. In it, I am a writer who becomes so affected by the atmosphere of hatred in the house where I am staying that I become obsessed with the idea that it will make a perfect setting for a murder, and determine to commit one. It sounds a bit involved, I know, but there’s no doubt whatever in my mind that when I got that bang on the head, I submerged myself in the character I had created, returned here to murder Mr. Hardstaffe, and somehow got back to London. My movements have all been rather hazy to me since I was in the raid, but as soon as I heard at the station what had
happened, something clicked into place in my mind, and I said to myself, ‘My God! I’ve murdered him!’”
There was a pause. Then the Superintendent said,
“You hadn’t any real reason for killing him, then?”
Arnold hesitated.
“Well, I disliked him intensely,” he said at length. “He was one of the worst-mannered men I’ve ever met, and he treated his wife abominably. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would have murdered her if I hadn’t disposed of him first.”
For the first time, his audience showed signs of real interest.
“What makes you think that, sir?”
Arnold described the scene he had inadvertently witnessed in the study.
It could no longer hurt Mr. Hardstaffe, and it might count in his own favour if he related the incident, he thought.
“Most interesting,” remarked the Superintendent.
“Most,” agreed the Constable.
Arnold became annoyed.
“Look here!” he exclaimed. “You don’t seem to believe a word I’m saying. Well, I’ll prove it to you that I’m a murderer. I’ll tell you exactly what I did, and exactly what Mr. Hardstaffe looked like after I’d—finished with him. The only thing I can’t tell you is which night it took place, because...”
“Because it was after you’d had that knock on the head,” the Constable suggested unnecessarily.
Superintendent frowned at him.
“Yes,” agreed Arnold. “I know it sounds as if I’m joking, but you’ll see... And, in any case, it doesn’t make any difference to my story because they all do exactly the same things in that house every night of the year. Mrs. Hardstaffe goes to bed at half-past nine, Miss Hardstaffe goes at half-past ten, and Mr. Hardstaffe sits up with a tantalus of whiskey and a syphon of sodawater till after the midnight news.”
“And who locks up the house for the night?” asked Cheam.
“Miss Hardstaffe,” replied Arnold. “She puts the dogs outside, then goes to see that the kitchen quarters are safe—no fires burning or lights forgotten. She lets the dogs in again, locks and bolts the front door, takes the dogs to the bedrooms—yes, they all sleep upstairs—then goes to bed herself.”
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