Dead or Alive

by Patricia Wentworth

  “Look here,” said Bill, “I’ll give you ten bob for your trouble in coming here, and if you can really tell me anything that will be of use to me, you shall have your fiver. But please don’t make anything up, because I shall know if you do.”

  She threw him a sharp, good-humoured glance. He had wondered if she would take offence, but this was business, and the drawling would-be fine lady was in abeyance. This was a girl who could take hard knocks and give them.

  She said, “I don’t need to make things up. If I make up my mind to tell you, it’ll be what happened—but I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “I’ll give you five minutes,” said Bill, and wondered whether, after all, he was giving her time to fake a story, but he had to let the Ogilvies know that he was probably going to be late for dinner.

  He got Jim Ogilvie on the telephone, and was told that they were alone and he could be as late as he liked.

  He came back to Beatrice Thompson. She hadn’t moved, but he thought that she had made up her mind.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well, it’s this way.” She lifted her chin and looked at him. “Mum don’t know—that’s what I’m boggling at. And what I want to know is this—is all this just a private talk between you and me, or is there any likelihoods of a police-court case, and things in the papers, and no saying where it’s going to stop?”

  The girl had a head on her shoulders. What she had to tell was the more likely to be of value. He said honestly,

  “I don’t know, Miss Thompson. I’ve no connection with the police. Mr O’Hara disappeared a year ago, and it is quite possible that he was murdered—but please keep that to yourself.”

  “Then I couldn’t do it for five pounds.” The blue eyes were as hard as marbles.

  He offered her ten, and she raised him to fifteen, and then stuck out for a bonus if it should come to a case in court.

  “Not that there’s any harm, but Mum’s old-fashioned—well, there, you’ve seen her for yourself. It’s going to upset her because I didn’t tell her at the time, but I don’t want to upset her for nothing.”

  Bill reflected that twenty pounds between them ought to have a soothing effect on Mrs Thompson’s feelings. And then he felt rather ashamed of himself because the girl said half defiantly,

  “She’s been a jolly good mother to us. She’s worked her fingers to the bone ever since Dad died, and it takes some doing with six, and none of them earning. You needn’t think it’s because I’m afraid of her, because I’m not.”

  “All right,” said Bill. “And now let’s have it, whatever it is.”

  She sat forward a little with her elbows on her knees and dropped her voice to a confidential tone.

  “Well, it was like this, Mr Coverdale. Mother was in hospital like she told you, and I was out of a job just men, and she asked me would I keep her place open, so I did, though I didn’t like spoiling my hands—I’m a waitress by rights.”

  “Yes?” said Bill encouragingly.

  “It was the fourth of October you wanted to hear about?”

  “Yes.”

  She gave a little laugh.

  “That’s an easy date for me to remember, because it’s my birthday. Well, I’d been doing Mum’s job for three or four days, and I’d got friendly with a girl in one of the flats—Mabel her name was. She worked in the flat just opposite that Miss Delorne. Well, come the day before my birthday—that’s October 3rd a year ago—we got talking, and I said it was my birthday next day and my friend wanted to take me out for a treat—he’s a real nice boy, and he’s got a good job and doing well in it. And Mabel told me her people were going away for two nights. She said, why not make up a party, her and me, and her boy friend and mine, and go to the new Palais de Danse which is just round the corner from Oleander Mansions, and me come back and sleep with her for company. She said her people had offered her to have her sister if she liked, but she said she’d rather have me, because her sister was one of those girls that can’t keep their hands off another girl’s boy, so she didn’t want to have her butting in.”

  Bill said, “I see—”

  “Mean, I call it!” said Miss Thompson with energy. “Mum ‘d have slapped any of us, and a good job too—that sort want smacking. Well, we fixed it up, and I don’t know when I enjoyed a party more. But I didn’t tell Mum because of her being in hospital, and I knew she’d just lie there and worry, and make sure I was on the road to ruin—as if a girl couldn’t get into trouble without ever going out of our street, if she wanted to. But it’s no good arguing with Mum—it’s the way she’s made.”

  “Well, you had your party. And then?”

  “George and Ernie took us home—back to Oleander Mansions, that is—and I won’t say we weren’t larking about a bit down in the entrance. Mabel had got her key and she let us in, and the boys said good-night, and there was some joking and larking going on, but all very quiet so as not to disturb anyone. There’s a night porter, but he don’t come unless you ring for him, and there’s nobody working the lift, but those that want to can work it themselves—anyhow the staff’s not supposed to. So Mabel and me walked up the stairs. Her flat’s on the third floor, and she’d just got the door open when I found I’d dropped my bag. ‘Coo!” I said. ‘That’s young Ernie and his nonsense. And I’m not going to lose that bag,’ I said, ‘with my new lipstick in it and all.’ And Mabel, she said she wasn’t going down all those stairs again, not for anybody. ‘And you won’t find it if you go,’ she said, ‘for as like as not you dropped it in the street.’ Well, I knew I hadn’t, so I ran down, and there it was, right by the door where Ernie had been carrying on. So I picked it up and back up the stairs with it, and when I come to the landing Mabel had gone in and left the door on the jar. I was just going to push it, when the door across the landing opened and a gentleman came out.”

  She picked up the wedding group and pointed with her scarlet finger-nail at Robin O’Hara.

  “That gentleman,” she said, and sat back.

  Bill’s heart beat quicker.

  “Sure?” he said.

  She took up the other two sheets, and pointed out Robin O’Hara in each of the photographs.

  “It was that gentleman.”

  “How was he dressed?” said Bill.

  Beatrice sat forward again.

  “He’d taken his coat off. He’d a fancy striped shirt on, and a collar to match, and some kind of tie with a stripe in it, and dark trousers—navy blue, I think. He’d taken his waistcoat off, and he’d got his shoes in his hand putting them out. The porter does them for the gentlemen if they make an arrangement.”

  “Then he’d been there before?”

  “Looked like it,” said Miss Thompson. “And Mabel said—”

  “Well?”

  “I described him, and she said he passed for Miss Delorne’s brother, only nobody believed it.”

  “Go on,” said Bill. “Or is that all?”

  “Not by half it isn’t,” said Miss Thompson with vigour.

  “Well, what happened?”

  “He pulled the door to behind him, and he put down his boots and come across very soft on his stocking feet. I’d my hand on the door and Mabel in call, so I wasn’t frightened, and he didn’t try to touch me. He stood a yard away and said very soft, ‘Will you take a message for me? It’s important.’ And I said, ‘What—now?’ and he said ‘Tomorrow will do.’ And whilst he was saying it he was writing on a bit of paper with a pencil he’d taken out of his trouser pocket, and he put the paper in my hand with a ten-shilling note, and back across the landing and in at Miss Delorne’s flat without another word.”

  What an odd story. If she wasn’t making it up, what had happened to the message? He said that out loud.

  “What happened to the message? Did you take it?”

  Miss Thompson blinked. She opened her mouth to speak and shut it again.

  “Well?” said Bill impatiently.

  “Well, that’s just where it’s a bit awkwa
rd,” said Miss Thompson. “I put it in my bag and I went into the flat, and Mabel wanted to know what had kept me, so I told her, and she said she didn’t believe me, teasing like. So I said, ‘Seeing’s believing,’ and I showed her the note. Well then, she wanted to read it, and I said she shouldn’t, and she said she was going to, and she made a snatch and it got torn between us. ‘Now see what you’ve done!’ I said. And she said ‘Well, you can’t go taking a note like that,’ and before I could stop her she’d put it on the kitchen fire.”

  An extraordinary sensation swept over Bill. Robin O’Hara creeping out of Della Delorne’s flat and seizing a desperate eleventh hour chance of sending a message—two girls playing, and the message gone up in smoke—Robin’s life gone too.… What was the message? To whom was it written? And why was it written? Yes, that above all—why was it written? Had he just learned something vital? Had he already embarked upon a hazardous course, attempted at the last moment to safeguard himself by a message to Garratt or to Meg?

  He looked up, to find Beatrice Thompson’s eyes fixed on him with a curious expression. He guessed at an impulse held in check by doubt or prudence. An illuminating flash passed through his mind. He leaned forward with an abrupt movement and said,

  “You wouldn’t let Mabel read the note, but did you read it yourself?”

  A blush rose becomingly in Miss Beatrice Thompson’s cheeks. She blinked again and said,

  “Well, Mr Coverdale, I did.”

  XX

  Bill was conscious of triumph, suspense, anticipation. He leaned forward and said insistently,

  “You did. I thought so. What was in it?”

  “It was only a line, Mr Coverdale.” She was leaning towards him in voluble explanation. “It was only a line, and I suppose I oughtn’t to have looked, but it wasn’t like an ordinary note, him being a stranger and coming out of that Miss Delorne’s flat like that in the middle of the night. I thought I’d just see what kind of a message it was he was asking me to take, because Mum’s got a story about a girl that was given a note in the street and five shillings to take it, and the envelope came unstuck and she looked inside, and it said, ‘Keep the bearer till I come,’ and no name at the end, only initials. Whiteslavers, that was. So I thought I’d have a look just in case. But it was only one line, and all it said was, ‘Going down to some place or other,’ and initials signed to it. And I can’t remember what the first one was, but there was an O, and an H after that, tight up to each other with a sort of a comma between them.”

  Was she making it up? No, he was sure she wasn’t. But the message—he must get the message straightened out. He said,

  “Please, Miss Thompson, think carefully. That message may be most awfully important. Where did he say he was going?”

  She rolled her eyes at him in a puzzled way.

  “It was some place or other, Mr Coverdale.”

  And all at once there was a most frightful thought in his mind. “Some place or other, or some Place or other?” Which did she mean, and how was he to find out without asking a leading question? He got a piece of the hotel paper and gave it to her with a pencil out of his own pocket.

  “Now, Miss Thompson, will you write that message down as nearly as possible as you saw it? Write down everything you remember seeing, even if it’s only part of a word. Give me as much as you can.”

  She rested the paper on the wedding photograph and wrote the first few words quickly, then stopped, lifted the pencil and wrote again, leaving a gap. Then, frowning, she bent over the paper, pencil poised, and all at once with a quick movement she scribbled in the empty space.

  “There!” she said and pushed the paper at him. “That’s the best I can do. I can’t swear to the name but it was something like that.”

  Bill read in a neat characterless hand, “I am going down to—” and then a gap, and then a scribble that looked like “stow.” Then, most decidedly and unmistakeably, “Place,” with a capital p. All his pulses jumped. “I am going down to—stow Place.”

  He had to put his leading question then. He couldn’t keep it back.

  He said, “Was it Ledstow Place?” and she blinked at him and said,

  “Oh yes, Mr Coverdale, it was.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded and laughed.

  “Oh yes. So soon as you said it I could see it just like he’d written it down.”

  Ledstow Place! It seemed incredible. Four days after he had disappeared Robin O’Hara had been in Oleander Mansions at Della Delorne’s flat, and he had tried to send a note to say that he was going down to Ledstow Place … who was the note for? He asked the question with a rising excitement.

  “And who was it adressed to?”

  “Well, that’s what I didn’t see, and I was going to tell you about it. If I’d had the name and address, I’d have taken the message in the morning, as much as I could remember of it, but it was only the inside I’d looked at, and there was nothing to go by. Well, after the note got torn and Mabel had put it on the fire, which she’d no business to do, and so I told her, I began to think what I could do, because I’d got his ten-shilling note. Then it come to me p’raps I could go across to Miss Delorne’s flat and just let him know I’d had an accident with his note. I told Mabel what I was going to do, and she promised to leave the door open and be just inside, but when I got half way across the landing I didn’t go any further.” A funny little shiver passed over her and she stopped.

  “Why didn’t you?” said Bill quickly.

  “Well, it sounds silly, Mr Coverdale, but his shoes were gone.”

  “His shoes?”

  She shivered again.

  “I told you he was in his stocking feet with his shoes in his hand, putting them out for the porter. And then five minutes after they weren’t there. It sounds awful silly, but I got a kind of a creep down my back when I saw they weren’t there, and I couldn’t have gone on and knocked on the door, not for anything in the world I couldn’t.”

  Bill sat in a frowning silence. Was Robin being so watched that he had to have an excuse for opening the door of Della Delorne’s flat? He had come out with the shoes in his hand, and put them down, and gone back into the flat after writing his note and giving it to Beatrice Thompson. And then, five minutes afterwards, the shoes were gone again.

  That looked as if the shoes were an excuse. He was doing something he didn’t want known, and if he was heard opening the door, the shoes would be a very good excuse. But he couldn’t have counted on Beatrice Thompson. What was he planning to do when he came out with those shoes in his hand, very quietly and in his stocking feet? He had a slip of paper ready. And a pencil. And a ten-shilling note. All very handy. Bill thought he must have planned to put his message and the ten-shilling note through the letter-box of the opposite flat and chance Mabel’s getting it to its destination—any decent girl would. If he had to write the note out there on the landing, someone must have been watching him pretty closely in the flat. The someone would be Della Delorne. That brought her into the affair of his murder with a vengeance. If she wasn’t in it, if he wasn’t suspecting her, he could have written his note under her eyes and walked round to the post with it. There would have been no reason why he shouldn’t.

  No, he had been on the track of some very dangerous people—this on Garratt’s authority—and the track had led him to his death.

  And this—this was the last living sight of Robin O’Hara—a figure emerging stealthily from Della Delorne’s flat, sending, or trying to send, an eleventh-hour message, and then vanishing into the flat again, or so off the map and out of everybody’s ken.

  And that eleventh-hour message—“I am going down to Ledstow Place.”

  The track ended at Ledstow Place.

  The violence of his mental reaction brought his head up with a jerk. It was nonsense. It was the most completely damnable nonsense. And then, sitting there in the hotel lounge with Beatrice Thompson gazing at him between interest and alarm, two things happened i
n his mind. They happened simultaneously but separately. It was like being aware of two quite different scenes on the same brightly lighted stage.

  On the one hand he saw a window break suddenly, and on the other he saw Beatrice Thompson look at Meg’s wedding group and point with a scarlet fingernail. The window was a top-storey window of the house on the island at Ledstow Place. He looked back over his shoulder in the dusk, caught a fleeting gleam of daylight on the glass, and saw it break—suddenly, inexplicably. The scarlet nail pointed at the Professor. Miss Thompson’s voice said eagerly, “I’ve seen that old gentleman;” and then, “Coming out of Miss Delorne’s flat—nine o’clock in the morning;” and then, “Disgusting, I call it.”

  And the track which Robin O’Hara was following had led to Ledstow Place.

  It wasn’t possible.

  He clenched his hands and forced his voice.

  “Miss Thompson—why did you say that you recognized someone else in that group you’ve got there?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Then you’ve a very short memory.” He leaned across and picked up the wedding group. “When I first showed you this, you said you recognized someone. Not Mr O’Hara—you didn’t say anything about him to start with. I want to know why.”

  The eyes ceased to roll. They became shrewd and businesslike.

  “Well, we hadn’t fixed anything up then—had we? Of course I recognized him right away.” She pointed at Robin in his bridegroom’s array. “I recognized him all right, but I wasn’t going to say so till we’d got the business part settled. Well, you know how it is—a girl’s got to look out for herself or she’ll get left.”

  A tremendous feeling of relief came over Bill.

  “Then you didn’t really see the Professor—the old gentleman—at all?”