Dead or Alive

by Patricia Wentworth

  The detachment became more marked.

  “That, sir, is hardly for me to say.”

  Bill looked at him sharply for a moment. Then he said,

  “Well, you were both ill. What happened after that?”

  “Mr Postlethwaite, sir, who was always the soul of kindness, suggested that we should take a holiday. It was a very inconvenient time for illness to occur, being within a week of the move to Ledstow Place, and it was put to me and Mrs Evans that it would be best if the move was put through with a temporary staff while Mrs Evans and me recuperated. The indisposition was very severe, and there was no denying that we should have been more of a hindrance than a help, so we come away to my married brother in London, and when the fortnight was up and I had wrote—written—to say that being now recovered we were ready and wishful to take up our duties again, there come back a letter to say that Mr Postlethwaite was keeping the temporary staff on permanent, and enclosing a month’s wages in lieu of notice.”

  “A letter? From whom?”

  Evans turned a mutely understanding eye upon him.

  “From Mr Postlethwaite.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It was in his hand, Mr Bill.”

  “Poor old boy—he must have gone off his head.”

  “It’s very kind of you to say so, sir, I’m sure. I won’t say as—that—I hadn’t a similar thought, but Mrs Evans, sir—”

  “Yes, Evans. Go on.”

  “Perhaps I’d better not, Mr Bill.”

  “No, I think you’d better.”

  “Well, sir, what Mrs Evans says is that Mr Postlethwaite never wrote the letter, or if he did he was drove to it. But that’s a bit farfetched to my mind, and I put it down to her being upset, though I don’t deny that there’s those that might have worked on him for their own ends.”

  “Why didn’t you go to Mrs O’Hara?” said Bill.

  “Well, sir, there’s no denying we were hurt—with the whole family as you might say—and by all accounts Miss Meg had troubles of her own. Then just when we were thinking what we’d better do, Lady Latimer writes and says will we go to Scotland to her mother, Mrs Campbell, and Mrs Evans says ‘The further the better, William,’ so we went.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Mrs Campbell deceased a month ago, sir. She was ninety-seven years of age. And Mrs Evans and me, not being wishful to stay in Scotland, we come to my brother again with a view to looking around.”

  Bill heaved a sigh of relief. He plunged into an offer of his flat and himself with something of the trepidation which accompanies a proposal of matrimony. In some odd way the Evanses and Meg were associated in his mind. Meg might refuse him, but would she—could she refuse them?

  Evans received the offer with a dignity which only thinly disguised a very real gratification. There was a touch of emotion instantly and sternly controlled. It was with an air of benign loftiness that he intimated his own favourable consideration of the offer, coupled with the necessity for talking things over with Mrs Evans.

  They parted.

  Bill had lunch, and after lunch went round to see Garratt.

  “Has that young woman of yours seen her lawyer yet?”

  Bill grinned maliciously.

  “No, but I have just engaged the cook—la cuisinière, feminine—of her uncle—oncle, masculine—and the butler of her uncle—still masculine but probably batty, and I haven’t the slightest idea what butler is in French. And do you know why, my friend—ami, masculine? … You don’t? Then I’ll tell you—je te dirais. It’s because only England can produce an Evans.”

  “Sounds more like Wales,” said Garratt. “What are you talking about anyway?”

  “My butler and my cook—once Henry Postlethwaite’s butler and Henry Postlethwaite’s cook, but now, owing to the Satanic activities of an—unnamed—snake in the grass, my cook and my butler. In fact, my married couple.”

  “Are you drunk?” said Garratt rudely.

  “You’re always asking me that. I’m only exhilarated, and if you knew all, you would be exhilarated too, because when Mrs Evans is my cook you shall come and dine with me and have the meal of your life. She always was wasted on the Professor, but how even he could have been balmy enough to let her go—”

  “Have you come here to talk to me about cooks and butlers?” said Garratt dangerously.

  “Not entirely. I want to know if you’ve dug up anything more about the Delome woman”—his tone was now entirely serious—“and I want to see anything you’ve got in the way of proof—documentary proof of O’Hara’s death. You’ve got to give me something that will convince Meg. She won’t go a step till she’s sure.”

  Garratt fixed him with a hard stare.

  “Why didn’t you bring her along?”

  “She’s gone out of town—to her uncle’s.”

  “Run away?”

  “Run away,” said Bill. Oddly enough, it had not occurred to him before, but it did now. The thrill of the chase was added to the other feelings which he had about Meg.

  Garratt went over to a nest of drawers at the far side of the room.

  “Damn all women!” he said, after which he jerked a drawer open and came back with a file in his hand. He threw it on the table in Bill’s direction and said, “You can look at that there, but you can’t take it away. We’ll put everything that’s necessary at the disposal of Mrs O’Hara’s lawyers. The really conclusive thing is the break in the leg. We dug up the X-ray of O’Hara’s break. There were some peculiar features. It’s there—you can compare it with the X-ray we had done of the unnamed corpse. It’s the same break—there’s not the slightest doubt. Look for yourself. There’s the surgeon’s affidavit. It’s unpleasant evidence to put before Mrs O’Hara, but if she won’t take your word for it, you’ll have to bring her along and let her see for herself. I want that packet, and I want it p.d.q., before the clever swab who is after it thinks out some new dodge for stopping me and getting it himself.”

  “What do you think is in it?” said Bill.

  Garratt grimaced.

  “Dunno. Perhaps t’other fellow don’t either.” His eyebrows went up and his scalp twitched. “Might be anything—nothing—finger-prints—complete dossiers, present whereabouts, and machinations of some of the leading shrinking violets of international crime. T’other fellow’s got the jumps about it whatever it is, or he wouldn’t be trying to put the wind up Mrs O’Hara or—taking pot shots at you in the dark.”

  Bill looked at him steadily.

  “Why at me?”

  “Well,” said Garratt in a drawl unnaturally removed from his ordinary staccato speech, “well, you might be considered in the light of an incentive, you know. Mrs O’Hara can’t very well marry you unless she proves O’Hara’s death, and if you were out of the way, they might think that she wouldn’t be so keen about proving it.”

  An angry colour ran up to the very roots of Bill Coverdale’s hair. Garratt jerked a shoulder impatiently.

  “You needn’t bother to murder me—I’m not saying it. But t’other fellow may be.”

  Bill mastered himself with a furious effort. It was no good raging at Garratt, it would merely gratify him. He said drily,

  “I thought the official theory was that I’d invented the shot or imagined it, or that I’d done it myself, or that Meg had done it in a pair of trousers she’d been wearing under her evening dress. You’ll remember that I dug in my toes about the trousers.”

  “There isn’t an official theory,” said Garratt gloomily. “But the people who killed O’Hara certainly wouldn’t stick at doing you in if they thought you were in their way. Now about this Della Delorne woman—”

  “What about her?”

  “Next door to nothing. She’s away—it seems to be a more or less chronic state. The char-lady hasn’t produced anything worth having up to date. She’s been away too, visiting her sister in the country. Oh Lord—what a life!” He grinned suddenly at Bill. “Get along out of here and bring that
young woman of yours up to the scratch! I’m supposed to be doing some work.”

  Bill went back to his hotel and sat down to write a difficult letter to Meg O’Hara. It was difficult because he had to convince her that Robin was dead, and to do this it was necessary to put before her with plainness the evidence which Garratt had shown him. He wrote this part of the letter two or three times, because whenever he had been really plain and convincing it sounded bald and brutal, and whenever he tried to present the evidence tactfully it didn’t sound in the least convincing, and Meg had simply got to be convinced. He made a pencil draft, read it through, thought he had done it very badly, and proceeded, still in pencil, to the second part of the letter. It was even more difficult, because his thoughts were quite full of the flat, and the Evanses, and wanting to marry Meg with as little delay as possible, and it wouldn’t be decent to let these things escape into a letter which contained the proofs of Robin O’Hara’s death. He could, of course, tell her that he had taken the Hewletts’ flat. There was nothing ipso facto indecent about his telling her that he had taken a flat. It looked a little bald as he added it to the pencil draft—“I have taken the Hewletts’ flat.” Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t add anything to the first part of his letter.…

  It would be better. But the picture of Meg in that mouldy house, getting a mouldy letter from him full of mortuary details and without so much as a friendly word at the end, was too much. He had stroked out the sentence about the flat. He now indicated that it was to be restored by making a series of dots underneath the stroke-out line. Very well, he had taken the Hewletts’ flat. What about it now? Could he tell Meg how many rooms there were? Could he describe the rooms without becoming tendencious? He wrote a horrible sentence exactly like an excerpt from a house-agent’s list. “There is a dining-room, a drawing-room, four bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom.”

  He looked gloomily at this statement. It was horrible, but no one could say that it was tendencious. It was bald, blameless, and blatantly boring. If he made the flat sound boring, Meg wouldn’t want to come and live in it. He broke hastily into a panegyric on the view from the drawing-room windows—tree-tops, and a bit of the river, and if you leaned out you could see the sunset and reflections in the water.

  He frowned at his panegyric after he had written it, poised his pencil to cross it out, and then let it alone and went quickly on to the Evanses. The Evanses were safe ground as long as he remembered not to say anything that would look as if Meg was going to have a share in them. At this point something primitive got up and kicked. Hang it all, Meg knew he loved her. O’Hara had been a damned bad husband, and he’d been dead for a year. What was the good of all this beating about the bush?

  Bill wrestled with these feelings more or less successfully, and continued his letter. He told Meg all about the Evanses, and how angry Mrs Evans had been at the suggestion that she might have cooked a toadstool by mistake. When he had finished all that, he sat considering how he should end the letter. After a bit he wrote:

  “How long are you going to stay at Ledstow? I think you ought to come back as soon as you can and see your lawyer. I should like to drive down and fetch you. Please let me.

  “Bill.”

  P.S. I can come tomorrow if you wire. I think that tomorrow would be a good day, really.”

  He read the whole thing through, copied it out with a few verbal alterations, put it in an envelope, addressed it, and posted it in the hotel letter-box. When he had done this, he felt rather as if he had been assisting at Robin O’Hara’s funeral. There was the sense of an unpleasant duty accomplished, a restrained gloom consented to, and the feeling that the blinds could now be pulled up and more cheerful things considered. He proceeded to consider them, and found them pleasant. His mind might have been less at ease if he had known that his letter would never reach Meg, and that when he posted it he had been posting a death warrant.

  XVII

  Meg went into Ledlington next day and bought her wool. It wasn’t a very satisfactory expedition, because Miss Cannock, kind, fussy and thick-skinned, insisted on coming too—“And your uncle would wish you to take the car, I know. He is so entirely immersed at present that I couldn’t mention it, but he would, I know, be greatly distressed if you did not take the car. The buses are most inconvenient”—this Meg could well believe—“and such a horrid smell of petrol. In fact, Mrs O’Hara, it sometimes seems to me that this so-called mechanical age has some very grave disadvantages, and that life in the country must really have been pleasanter when you could drive comfortably along the lanes in a governess-cart or a pony-trap. Going into Ledlington would have been a very agreeable expedition. But I couldn’t attempt to drive even a very quiet pony, with so many cars on the road, and coming round corners at the rate they do.”

  Meg wasn’t attending to this very much. She was puzzled.

  “I didn’t know Uncle Henry had started a car. He always said he wouldn’t have one. What has he got—and who drives it? Don’t tell me he does!”

  “Oh no!” Miss Cannock was quite shocked. “Oh no, Mrs O’Hara—of course not! But I see you are joking.” She smiled, a polite little twisted smile. “But about the car—I’m afraid I’m very ignorant, but I really don’t know what sort it is. He got it second-hand in a very good condition, and the colour is a pleasing shade of grey—or perhaps you would call it drab. I don’t really think we could have lived here without some kind of conveyance—it’s so very remote and the buses not at all convenient—in fact, I may say, most inconvenient.”

  “Who drives it?” said Meg again, and not idly, because if it was the Cannock, she could drive herself, but she wouldn’t get the chance of driving Meg. Life mightn’t be very sweet at the moment, but it had possibilities, and anyhow she didn’t want to die in a messy motor smash with a twittering female who probably didn’t know a brake from an accelerator.

  “Oh, the gardener,” said Miss Cannock. “Such a nice man, and such an excellent driver. I am a little inclined to be nervous in a motor car, but Henderson is so very reliable that I don’t feel a twinge, not the least twinge of anxiety, when he is driving.”

  Meg pricked up her ears. So there was a gardener called Henderson who drove the car. Not, oh surely not, the loutish boy who lived at the lodge. She said quickly,

  “Not that boy at the lodge!”

  Miss Cannock looked quite shocked again.

  “Oh no—oh dear, no! I’m afraid I should be very nervous about trusting myself to John. He is a good boy, but he naturally has not his father’s experience.”

  The family at the lodge fell into place in Meg’s mind. Henderson was probably a widower, the old woman was his mother, and the loutish boy his son. Not local people, according to William. She wondered how long you had to live here before you were local. At any other time—or perhaps it would be more correct to say in any other place—she wouldn’t have given the Hendersons a second thought, but at Ledstow you extracted all you possibly could from its scant and arid themes. She therefore pursued the subject.

  “Have they been here long?”

  “I beg your pardon, Mrs O’Hara?”

  What an irritating way the Cannock had of peering through those horrible tinted glasses. She poked her head, she peered, she wore beaded slippers, and her hands were never still—“Darling Uncle Henry—how could you?”

  “The Hendersons. They live at the lodge, don’t they? William said they weren’t local.”

  “Excellent people,” said Miss Cannock. “No, not local. Mr Postlethwaite engaged them when we came here.”

  The excellent Henderson drove them into Ledlington in what proved to be a Bentley saloon. He certainly drove very well, but Meg did not care about his looks. She thought the whole family singularly unprepossessing. The man was powerfully built, he handled the car like an expert, and he had a manner that would have got him dismissed at sight by most private employers. His eyes were bold and his air familiar. Meg thought the Cannock even more of a fool than sh
e had taken her for, since she praised him continually and was obviously quite unaware that his manners needed mending.

  They parked the car in the Market Square and shopped. Miss Cannock had a dozen fiddley errands—a scrap of ribbon to match, a winter hat to consider, and a long list of household commissions for Mrs Miller—“And I really think I ought to have brought her with us, for it’s so easy to get the wrong thing, and she’s very particular. An invaluable person, Mrs O’Hara, but not very even-tempered, and I so very much dislike anything that savours of friction. But if you will give me your advice, I shall not be so afraid of going wrong. Two heads are better than one, as they say.”

  Meg had to abandon any hope of freeing herself. The Cannock was the worst shopper she had ever seen. Confronted with a choice of any kind, she became a prey to indecision. It was bad enough when she was buying dusters, furniturepolish, clothes-pegs, sausages, and tinned fruit, but in the hat department of Ashley’s she rapidly approached complete mental disintegration. She tried on everything, and looked lingeringly at her profile in a hand mirror. Meg gazed in fascinated horror at Miss Cannock in a bright orange beret, Miss Cannock in a viridian velvet tam, Miss Cannock in a succession of fly-away shepherdess hats in a variety of unsuitable shades. In the end she came away without buying anything, extending to two exhausted ministrants a consolatory hope that she might call again next week to look through their new stock.

  It was perhaps because she was rather dazed that Meg so nearly had an accident when they came out. The High Street is very narrow just above Ashley’s, and the trams come round the corner and down a short incline. Miss Cannock began to cross the street at this point. Meg was beside her, certainly as far as the middle of the road, but just what happened after that she was never quite sure. It was market day and there were a great many people about. The tram came round the corner, and there was a car coming up the other way, and Miss Cannock got nervous and stopped. Then she ran back, or ran forward, or both—that was the part Meg couldn’t get clear. There was a screech of brakes from the car, a warning bell from the tram, and somehow or other Meg found herself face-downwards on the track with the metal of the tram-line cold against her mouth and the most sickening sensation of terror almost stopping her heart. She didn’t quite faint, but she came very near it. The next thing she knew she was being pulled up, and a woman was saying in a sobbing, gasping voice, “Right under the tram she was—right under the tram!”