‘He’s done it on us proper, the rogue,’ panted Mrs. Nicholls after their fruitless exertions.
‘He was good to us while he was with us, mother…’
‘Good to us! I like that. Do you know you’ll have to find a job again…’
And she started to pace the room muttering, ‘I can’t believe it’, until finally her voice rose to a hysterical shriek and she began to beat the walls in temper.
To tell the truth, Dorothy was standing it better than her mother. At first, taking a man from his wife and family had seemed quite a conquest, especially when he was rich and decent. Somehow she had imagined in those days a life of elegant ease, servants at her beck and call, cruises and the Riviera…All the stuff she read about in the novelettes she gobbled up. But it hadn’t turned out that way. How was she to know that Dodd’s business really ran on his wife’s money? Or that Dodd still loved his wife after his lapse, in spite of the fact that his family wanted to get rid of him and pushed through a divorce? And then Dodd had said nothing about marriage, but taken her on as a kind of housekeeper at Mon Abri, where he retired from the world. He’d even suggested she bring her mother along for company!
Dorothy had long been fed-up with it. Dodd had never been her idea of a romantic lover, but after the divorce, he’d behaved like someone who had done wrong and was anxious to make amends to his former wife. He’d started to treat Dorothy, too, as if he’d wronged her! He’d given her all she needed in the way of money, never put anything in the way of her enjoying herself, but had retired with his personal secrets to his bed in the cockloft. It had suffocated Dorothy sitting at Mon Abri with her mother when Dodd was out in the evening with his vulgar pals at the local pub, or away for a day or two, fishing somewhere with nobody knew whom. Dorothy was still under forty, romantic, passionate and comely. She wanted a taste of life before she grew like her mother, bitter, querulous and parsimonious. Sooner or later she wouldn’t be able to stand the hot-house imprisonment of Mon Abri, and Dodd and her mother…She’d kick over the traces and go…Now she was free again, although the way she’d secured her release made her weep for poor Harry Dodd.
‘What are we going to do? There’s only ten pounds in his wallet. He must have put his remittance in the bank. We can’t get that out…’
‘Oh, shut up, mother. We can work. I can get a job. I’m not too old…’
‘Well, I’m not taking any more lodgers in to please you or anybody else. It’s a dirty, mean trick lie’s played…’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘What do you mean…?’
‘With him…With Harry…?’
They had been too busy wondering how the affair was going to affect them to get in a panic. Now they faced each other in fear.
‘He’s been stabbed by somebody. Likely as not by one of them Dodds, his family. They always hated him. And here we are, holding the baby. It’s not fair.’
‘We’d better get a doctor, mother.’
‘What’s the use? He’s dead. It’s a police job, my girl. But before we get the police in here messing about, we’ve got to think things out.’
‘Police!’
Dorothy hadn’t thought of that. She started to cry noisily, tears like glass peas running down her cheeks.
‘Shut up! I’ve got to think.’
The old woman’s face was as hard as a rock. She’d had plenty of troubles of her own in her time, and it needed a lot to put her out. Dorothy had inherited her father’s amorous propensities. He’d had two girls in the family way on his hands at the same time, and then drowned himself in the canal. There wasn’t much Mrs. Nicholls didn’t know after Nicholls had finished with her.
They turned the house upside down again, looking for the Will, but nothing more came to light except a little diary with a list of investments from which Dodd seemed to derive his income. And they were in the hands of a firm of London solicitors! Mrs. Nicholls solemnly took the photograph of Dodd which stood in a silver frame, beaming on Dorothy’s bed, flung it across the room, and then followed it and ground it under her heel.
‘The swine!’
‘We ought to do something…The police ought to know…’
It was three in the morning, Dodd was lying dead in the old woman’s bed, and they weren’t a bit nearer getting his money.
‘Has it dawned on you, my girl, the police might think we did it?’
Dorothy’s mouth opened wide and she emitted a loud, high-pitched scream.
‘No…No…They know we wouldn’t…Besides, why should we?’
‘You never know, when the police get about, what they find out, and if they don’t find out, they make up. However, there doesn’t seem any way out. If we bury him in the garden and keep on drawing his income, it’ll mean getting round the bank and them solicitors. It just wouldn’t work. And if we ran off, they’d find us, you being too dumb to drive even the car. No, better get in the police. We’ve clone nothin’ wrong. They can’t say we did it. Who’s goin’ to do it, you or me? What shall we tell Buckley when he gets here? He’ll want to know what we’ve been doin’ all this time with the body.’
‘I can’t think…’
‘You never could. I’d better ring them, and we’ll say we didn’t know he was dead or the formalities in cases like this. We’ll just act dumb. And that won’t be difficult for you, my girl. You’re never any help…’
But Dorothy didn’t seem to hear. She was actually smiling a kind of smug, feline smile at her own thoughts. Freedom and adventure again…
‘Well…? What are you smilin’ at? Go and phone Buckley at the police station. Just tell him Mr. Dodd died suddenly and will he come up. Don’t say any more. You hear me? Not another word. Now get goin’…’
Dorothy undulated to the hall. There was a new provocative swing of her hips and her lethargy was gone. Mrs. Nicholls suddenly changed her mind and took up the phone before her daughter could get to it. She never knew what Dorothy would say with a man at the other end! She dialled a number, after looking it up in the book. At the police house in Brande the bell began to ring, the dog barked, P.C. Buckley turned and grunted, and Charles Buckley, aged ten months, awoke and started to howl.
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He'd Rather Be Dead Page 22
