Dead or Alive

by Patricia Wentworth

Miss Thompson tossed her head.

  “I don’t tell lies, Mr Coverdale! Of course I’d seen him—like I told you. Coming out of Miss Delorne’s flat he was, at nine o’clock in the morning, and looking as pleased with himself as a cat that’s been at the cream, the horrid old man.”

  The dead weight of apprehension settled slowly down again. The Professor? Incredible. But this girl wasn’t lying. She had really seen him coming out of Della Delorne’s flat.… She couldn’t have seen him. It was impossible.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  “He hasn’t got a beard in the photograph, of course,” she said.

  “Then you can’t be sure.”

  “The one I saw had a beard. And he walked sort of lame. Does this one walk lame? Because if he does, it would kind of prove it was him, wouldn’t it?”

  Bill took the photograph away from her and laid it down. There wasn’t anything more to say. That leonine head with its shock of white hair would be easily recognized, beard or no beard. But the limp made the recognition certain. It was the Professor whom she had seen. There was only one more question to ask.

  “When did you see him?”

  Miss Thompson considered.

  “Well, the fourth was my birthday, October the fourth, the night the other one, Mr O’Hara, gave me the note, only by the time it came to that it was well over midnight and we’d got into October the fifth, and it wasn’t that day I saw the old gentleman, but it was the next, and that would make it October the sixth. And it was nine o’clock in the morning, like I told you, and he came on out and down the stairs, and that was the last I saw of him.” She got up and began to button her coat. “If that’s all, Mr Coverdale, I’ll be getting along. It’s not the Palais-de-Danse tonight, but we did think about going to the pictures, so if there isn’t anything more—”

  There wasn’t anything more.

  He paid her, shook hands, saw her out, and came back again to the place where they had talked. There wasn’t anything more. The phrase summed up the feeling which was pressing in upon him and which he was resisting with an ever-weakening conviction. There wasn’t anything more. He had followed the track which Robin O’Hara had followed. It led to the Professor, and to Ledstow Place, and it broke off short there. He felt as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff where the path had broken off and where one step more might take him over the edge. Robin O’Hara had gone down to Ledstow Place. Had that been the step which had taken him over the edge?

  Meg was at Ledstow Place now.

  A horrible cold fear swept over him, quite instinctive, quite unreasoning.

  And then and there he remembered Meg talking to him on the telephone yesterday—“A tram—a beastly juggernaut of a tram” … “I nearly came to a sticky end.…” “I suppose I slipped.…” Was that to have been the step over the edge for Meg?

  All at once, out of the horror and confusion which filled his mind, there emerged a clear and definite conclusion. Meg must be got away from Ledstow Place—now—at once—before anything else could happen. He hadn’t the slightest idea what excuse he was going to make or how he was going to get her away. He only knew that he was going to do it.

  From the telephone-box he rang up Jim Ogilvie and told him that he was called out of town. Perhaps it was a memory of Robin O’Hara that made him add, “I have to go down to Ledstow—a family emergency.”

  He tried for Garratt next, to be told that he was out. He didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. Garratt would have to know what the Thompson girl had said, but he had no time to waste on letting him know tonight, and no patience or temper to listen to Garratt telling him he had found another mare’s nest. Yet he gave the same message to Garratt’s man that he had given to Jim Ogilvie.

  “Tell him I’ve gone down to Ledstow. Tell him I’ll call him up. The address is Ledstow Place.”

  And with that he rang off and went out to get his car and to drive furiously through the dark upon the Ledlington road.

  XXI

  Meg had lunch with Miss Cannock in the room that would have been the study if Uncle Henry hadn’t had his study over on the island. This room, in which the Professor sat immersed and wrote the great work which was to bring down the high look and proud stomach of Hoppenglocker and all Hoppenglockerites, was by common consent the Study. As a result no one quite knew what to call the other room. It had, therefore, no official title, and was variously alluded to by members of the household.

  Meg found herself thinking of it as the Blue Room because of her blue curtains and the delphiniums in the chintz which she had chosen for it—no, not for it, but for its furniture—in the days when she and the furniture had a home at Way’s End. The chintz was getting very shabby now. Miller called it the hall room and Miss Cannock the morning room.

  It was not a very comfortable place for meals. A folding table had to be brought in from the hall and cleared away again afterwards. There was nowhere to put a joint if one had to be carved, and there was nowhere to stand any extra plates or dishes except the writing-table, so that at every meal there was the feeling that the house was being turned out, and that at any moment removers might appear to pack up the furniture and take it away. As for the joint difficulty, Mrs Miller met this by the simple expedient of not cooking one, her idea of lunch for two ladies being three cutlets and a rice pudding one day, and three cutlets and a blancmange the next.

  The third cutlet set up a delicate situation. Miss Cannock in her role of hostess—and how odd to see someone else being hostess in Uncle Henry’s house—was bound to offer it to Meg. Meg, hungry but polite, as became a guest, was bound to refuse. Whereupon Miss Cannock with an archly irritating laugh would daily remark, “Perhaps I had better save its life, or Mrs Miller’s feelings may be hurt.” The cutlets were very small, and Meg’s exasperation grew. After all, Miss Cannock was indubitably the housekeeper, and could order four cutlets or even six if so disposed.

  Today when offered the last cutlet, Meg thought with a sudden spurt of suspicion, “I wonder if she’s starving Uncle Henry,” and, nerved by this, she said, “Yes, thank you,” whereupon Miss Cannock helped her, and then sat gazing mournfully at her own empty plate. Meg was hungry, but it was all she could do to finish the cutlet. Miss Cannock looked ridiculously forlorn sitting there opposite her, fidgeting with that silly long scarf which she always wore and which was continually catching in something or falling off. She got out her handkerchief and rubbed the tip of her nose with it. She patted that old-fashioned fringe of hers, she straightened her scarf, she sighed. Meg swallowed the last bit of cutlet in a hurry and said,

  “I do hope it’s not going to rain.”

  Miss Cannock sighed again.

  “I am afraid it is not at all cheerful for you down here. Mr Postlethwaite is at the most critical point of his book, and I am naturally much occupied with him.”

  “You know,” said Meg, “he ought not to shut himself up like this—it’s quite terribly bad for him. He always did try to do it, but we didn’t let him. I tell you what, I’ll go over and see if I can’t drag him out for a walk this afternoon.”

  The door opened and Miller came in. He removed the dish which had held the cutlets and placed a very small milk pudding in front of Miss Cannock, who seemed to be too much flustered to attend to it.

  “Oh, Mrs O’Hara—indeed—I couldn’t! Mr Postlethwaite can be quite severe, and his orders—his most stringent orders—are that no one should interrupt him when he is writing. Besides he locks himself in, you know, at the far end of the bridge, and though he has entrusted me with the key of the door on this side, it is on the distinct understanding that I do not let it out of my keeping.” Her fluttering, fidgeting hands picked up a tablespoon and a large fork. “And now may I give you a little of this pudding?” She peered at it short-sightedly. “Rice, I believe—yes, rice. And I fear that Mrs Miller has burnt it.”

  Meg’s back was up. If Uncle Henry was being fed on about half a cutlet and a scrape of bu
rnt rice pudding, it was about time somebody did something about it. As a cook this Miller creature was a complete fraud. Remembering the Evanses, she boiled over.

  “She’s a very bad cook,” she said.

  Miss Cannock handed her a portion of dry pudding surrounded by black skin.

  “Oh, do you think so? Mr Postlethwaite has been quite satisfied with her, I believe—but this pudding does seem—”

  “Uncle Henry doesn’t notice,” said Meg. “But it’s terribly bad for him. He’d much better get rid of these Millers and have the Evanses back. I can’t think why he ever parted with them. I would never have let him if I’d been there. They looked after him so beautifully and understood all his ways, and Mrs Evans was the most melting cook.” Meg stopped abruptly because Miss Cannock, abandoning her pudding, was applying her handkerchief both to her nose and to the corners of her eyes with a hand which was shaking with emotion.

  “It’s very hard,” she said in a trembling voice. “I’ve done my best, and Mr Postlethwaite has been satisfied.” She paused, gulped, and dabbed with increasing vigour. “It’s so easy to come down and—find fault. And this isn’t London, and of course you have no idea of the difficulties of catering—so far away from the shops—and fish only twice a week unless you go into Ledlington specially—and of course I was engaged—as a secretary—and had no idea that I would—be hekl—responsible—for the housekeeping—for which I cannot feel that I have any aptitude—and which was never mentioned by Mr Postlethwaite when—he engaged me.”

  Meg cursed herself for a fool. Why on earth hadn’t she held her tongue? The Cannock bridling and fussing was bad enough, but the Cannock head over ears in a grievance and requiring consolation was worse—much worse. Her nose was growing steadily pinker and her sniffs more poignant. It took Meg a quarter of an hour to persuade her to stop dabbing her eyes and to eat her now horribly congealed pudding.

  She escape as soon as she could to her own room. The whole question of Uncle Henry—his meals, his domestic staff, and when if ever Meg might expect him to emerge from the book sufficiently to become aware that she was a guest in his house, had been most effectually shelved. Meg felt as if she couldn’t stay in the house another second. A secretary with a temper would have roused her own temper to give battle, but a weak, meek dreep of a secretary who oozed tears and went pink at the nose on the slightest provocation or without any provocation at all merely induced that frame of mind in which you hastily buy a ticket for China, or Peru, or Popocatapetl.

  “What a place—what a woman—what weather!” she exclaimed to herself as she came out of the front door into a thin cold drizzle. A low mist brooded over the ground, all ready to turn into fog when the dusk came down. Now there probably wouldn’t be any fog in Peru.

  As she crossed the neglected gravel, she pleased herself with the. fancy that an aeroplane might at any moment come swooping down out of the low grey clouds. There would be plenty of room for it to land in the park, and she would get in and fly away, and never have to eat Mrs Miller’s rice pudding, or console Miss Cannock again. The pilot was a little nebulous, and the destination anywhere in the world. It was a very pleasant fancy, and it would have been even pleasanter if she had not had the feeling that she might suddenly discover the pilot was Bill Coverdale—and of course that wouldn’t do at all. For one thing he had just written her a perfect beast of a letter and he certainly wouldn’t want to fly away with her to the ends of the earth, and for another even if he did want to she couldn’t possibly fly with him. “Oh no, no, no!” said Meg, and woke up out of her day-dream to scold herself. But of course this was just the sort of place to make you go crazy and start talking to yourself.

  She had turned to the right without much thought, and was now at the point where the drive, skirting the lake, rose a little above it and then dipped again. It was from this place that Bill Coverdale, looking towards the island, had seen a window suddenly break where the house looked over the wall that guarded it. Meg stopped as Bill had done, and looked across the water as he had looked. It was a natural vantage point from which the gaunt barrack of a house, the island, and the bridge which linked them were all very clear. The wall round the island house was so high that it could only just be seen—the roof and two small windows. But one of them was broken. It was funny that Meg should have thought of that, because at once she corrected the thought and told herself that the window was open. Not broken—open. And then she had to correct herself again, because if it was a sash window, half the frame would still be filled with glass. And it couldn’t be a casement, because every casement window in the world opened outwards. And if it opened outwards, where was it? No, she had to come back to her odd first impression of a window broken and the glass stripped clear of the frame so that the house now peered at her over the wall and across the water with one bright eye and one blank one. It gave her a queer sort of feeling and one she didn’t much like. It was horribly bad for Uncle Henry to shut himself up in that walled-in poke of a house, with the water right up to the walls and probably everything streaming with damp. Miss Cannock didn’t look as if she would ever think of having anything aired, and as for the Millers, Meg placed no dependence on them. The house was dirty and ill-kept, the meals were deplorable, and as Uncle Henry never noticed anything, the house on the island was probably even worse. She made up her mind that, tears or no tears, she must insist on seeing him. Only if Miss Cannock wouldn’t give up the key, what was she going to do about it?

  “What a life!” said Meg, and went on walking down towards the gates.

  She thought she would go into the village to buy some stamps. She wasn’t going to answer Bill’s horrid icy letter today, but perhaps tomorrow she would write him a few equally chilly lines, just to show that she didn’t care. The post-office was the general shop next door to the pub. Perhaps she would see William digging manure into the pub garden. What a thrilling thought! All at once she wondered whether the post-office had a telephone. Of course she hadn’t the slightest intention of ringing Bill up—not today anyway—but it would be rather nice to feel that she could do it if she wanted to.

  She arrived at the gates, tried them as a matter of form, and found them locked. This was only what she had expected. She would have to get one of the Hendersons to open them for her. The lodge door being unprovided with either a bell or a knocker, she was obliged to rap on it with her knuckles. It was a very hard door. The chocolate paint was peeling off, the doorstep looked as if no one had cleaned it for years, and the windows which flanked it on either side were dirty and closely curtained. Meg knocked half a dozen times and then went round to the back. There was a strong smell of dustbins and a nasty litter of old newspapers, cabbage-stalks, potato peelings, and crusts of bread.

  Mentally apostrophising Mrs Henderson as an old pig, Meg picked her way to the back door and banged upon it with her clenched fist. When she had banged half a dozen times she stopped to listen, and heard a slow, dragging footstep come down the stair. Presently the door swung in a little way and Mrs Henderson looked round it with a furtive air.

  Meg said “Good afternoon,” and received no response, only that suspicious stare. She had a horrid undecided feeling between being angry and something else. The something else was being frightened, only she pushed it quickly into a dark cupboard and locked the door on it because it was too positively inane. How could she possibly be frightened when there wasn’t anything to be frightened of?

  She said quickly, “Oh, will you please unlock the gate? I’m going into the village.”

  Mrs Henderson went on staring at her without opening the door any wider. She was very dirty and unkempt. After a considerable pause she said,

  “I’m hard of hearing.”

  Meg had to come nearer, and didn’t like it.

  “The gates are locked. I want to go into the village.”

  Mrs Henderson nodded.

  “They’re always locked. That’s orders.”

  “But I want to go into the vill
age.”

  Mrs Henderson shook her head with its sparse untidy hair.

  “I’m very hard of hearing.”

  Meg spoke louder, and pointed.

  “I want to go out. I want you to open the gates.”

  Mrs Henderson shook her head again.

  “Can’t be done. They’re to be kept locked—Mr Postlethwaite’s orders.”

  Meg said “Nonsense!” in a tone of brisk rage, and Mrs Henderson shut the door in her face.

  She not only shut it, she shot the bolt inside. Meg heard the whingeing creak as it went home. Then she heard Mrs Henderson go upstairs again with the heel of a downtrodden slipper slapping on every step.

  “Well!” said Meg, and boiled with righteous wrath.

  There was nothing for it but to go away, and as quickly as possible Meg went. But that slammed and bolted door had changed her lukewarm feeling that she might as well go and buy some stamps in the village to a stubborn determination to get there at any cost. The cost would be to her clothes, since she would have to get over the wall, but she meant to do it, and once outside, and the stamps in her pocket, even Mrs Henderson could scarcely refuse to let her in again. Somewhere in the depths of her heart Meg was aware that a refusal wouldn’t blight her very much. She would be able to bear with fortitude being locked out of Ledstow Place. But of course she wouldn’t be locked out, and she hadn’t even got over the wall yet. She worked her way along it on the left of the gates. There was a thick belt of shrubbery next to the drive, but between it and the wall there ran a sodden, neglected path slippery with clay and slimy with moss. There was therefore no hope of a tree with friendly branches to serve as a step-ladder. The wall was some eight feet high, built of brick with a small coping on the top, and it was in very good repair.

  After about thirty yards the shrubbery stopped, and the path with it. In front of her now was the rough open park, with an occasional tree or clump of trees, and the wall running on, sheer, bare, and unclimbable. None of the trees were anywhere near it. Meg decided that her proud spirit would just have to bend to necessity, and that the stamps must wait for another day. There was, after all, no raging hurry. She hadn’t meant to write to Bill till tomorrow anyhow.