Walk with Care

by Patricia Wentworth

  “The accused?” he said in a puzzled voice.

  “No, I’m the accused—aren’t I?” said Jeremy, and at that the telephone bell rang and Mannister, talking through a cross current of someone else’s conversation, was understood to say that he would be home about twelve.

  The cross current was very intriguing. Jeremy rang off with regret.—

  “Two girls telling each other off about one, Podger. A gay dog, I should say. The things they said to each other were fairly hot, but nothing to what they both said about Podger.”

  Mr Deane looked puzzled.

  “Do you know these people?”

  “They were merely obbligato. Mannister was the solo trombone—in a whisper. He’ll be back at twelve. I’m going out for half an hour.”

  Jeremy went back to the bank.

  The £50 had been handed in with a covering letter. They produced the letter. Jeremy looked at it, and could have sworn that he had written it himself. He read it, and was struck by the last sentence: “Kindly acknowledge to 29 Marsh Street.” That was ingenious. He put a square-topped finger under the words.

  “You did acknowledge it, I suppose?”

  “Certainly, Mr Ware.”

  Jeremy frowned at the man.

  “I didn’t pay in the fifty pounds, I didn’t write that letter, and I didn’t get any acknowledgment. I can’t stop now, but I’d like you to make a note of that, because I mean to get to the bottom of the whole thing.”

  “But, Mr Ware, what possible motive—”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out,” said Jeremy.

  Mannister came home at twelve. Jeremy thought he looked a bit off colour. He got off a piece in his platform manner about Brunon, but he wasn’t really in form. He had a stiff whisky and soda, and then asked whether his keys had turned up.

  “I’ve looked about in the room, sir. I didn’t like to go through your drawers.”

  “They wouldn’t be there.” Mannister drained his glass and set it down hard.

  Geoffrey Deane began to fuss round him, to ask questions about the keys, to lift papers and fidget with blotting-paper. Having drawn a blank, he caught up Jeremy’s suggestion.

  “I think perhaps the drawers should be looked through, sir.”

  “And how—” this was Mannister daunting a heckler—“and how, my dear Deane, are my keys to have concealed themselves in drawers which those very keys have locked?”

  Deane was snubbed but pertinacious. Deane had only wondered whether all the drawers were locked, and whether it wouldn’t be as well just to make sure which drawers were locked and which were unlocked, and whether by any possibility the keys might have slipped into one of the unlocked drawers.

  The top drawer on the left-hand side was not locked. Mr Deane, nervously persistent, pulled it open, and there, just showing beneath some oddments of loose paper, was an inch of bright steel chain.

  Jeremy, on the far side of the table, watched Mannister’s face. It had a blank look.

  Geoffrey Deane glanced quickly up. It was Jeremy who leaned across the table and pulled up the chain with the keys dangling at the end of it.

  “Here they are, sir,” he said.

  The blank look persisted.

  Geoffrey Deane seemed a little puzzled.

  “Now how did they get in there?” he said. “You must have been stooping over the table. Perhaps they caught without your noticing it, and then you shut the drawer. Or perhaps——”

  Mannister pushed back his chair and got up.

  “What does it matter?” The words hurried, jostling one another. “I’m overworked—I want rest—I forget things! I could have sworn—I could have sworn—” He held out his hand for the keys, thrust them violently into his trouser pocket, and went out of the room, banging the door behind him.

  Geoffrey Deane looked distressed.

  “He’s right—he wants a holiday,” he said. “That’s not the first thing he’s forgotten. I expect you’ve noticed, haven’t you? He ought to take a rest—but people won’t until it’s too late.” He shook his head and returned to his press-cuttings.

  Jeremy went back to Nym’s Row in his lunch hour with a feeling of flatness and anti-climax. Something was due to have happened, and nothing had happened except that Mannister had lost his temper and Geoffrey Deane had said he needed a holiday. He had said it more than once, in that pecking, irritating way he had of elaborating the obvious. Mannister needed a holiday. Didn’t Ware think that Mannister needed a holiday? Didn’t Ware think that it was a great mistake to put off taking a holiday when you needed one? Didn’t Ware think it would be a great mistake if Mannister didn’t take a holiday? He himself thought it would be a great mistake. And so forth and so on, with intervals in which he read aloud from the more laudatory of Mannister’s press-cuttings. Jeremy’s conclusion was that if he had to work more than very occasionally in the same room as Geoffrey Deane, he would find himself figuring in the head-lines of the evening papers—“Murder in Marsh Street, Secretary Arrested” He laughed, and went in to find his lunch ready and a letter propped up beside the plate.

  “Come by the second post,” said Mrs Walker—“and the Wallington post-mark. Put me in mind of when you used to go and stay there with old Miss Emily Ware—and it isn’t her writing neither.”

  She put down a good helping of potato pie in front of Jeremy and lingered, frankly curious.

  “A lawyer’s letter it looks like to me.”

  Jeremy opened the letter. Then he got up and walked over to the window. He stood there so long that Lizzie Walker said at last,

  “It’s not bad news, Master Jeremy?”

  Jeremy turned round with the letter in his hand.

  “I suppose she was the last relation I’ve got. I haven’t seen her for years. I suppose I ought to have.”

  “Is she gone, Master Jeremy?”

  Jeremy nodded.

  “Then you’ll be going to the funeral, I suppose. You did ought to do that.”

  “It’s over,” said Jeremy. “They’d only got an old address. I did write at Christmas, but she was ill, and I suppose it wasn’t anyone’s business to keep my address.” He paused, and then said in an odd, moved voice, “Lizzie, she’s left me the house and about a thousand a year.”

  “And so she did ought!” said Mrs Walker. Her rosy cheeks became rosier. “And I’m sure there’s no one better pleased than what I am, or than what Joe’ll be when I tell ’im, and it couldn’t be looked for that you’d go on living up a stair in a mews for h’ever, though you might go farther and fare worse, with rooms the price they are and landladies regular ’arpies some of them, to say nothing of their girls dressed up like actresses and not what your pore mother could ha’ borne to think of—a reel lady she was, with a kind word for h’everyone and as perlite to me and cook as she was to Lady ’Awkins up at the ’all, and when she lay a-dying she says to me, ‘Lizzie my dear,’ she says, ‘you’ll look after Master Jeremy, won’t you?’ And if I ’aven’t done it, I’ve tried, and I’m sure if you’d been my h’own—” Mrs Walker choked, shook out a large plain calico handkerchief, blew her nose vigorously, and sitting down in Jeremy’s chair, proceeded to have what she called a good cry.

  Jeremy patted her shoulder, promised he wouldn’t marry a landlady’s daughter, and told her that the Evans would think she was having a row with him.

  Mrs Walker produced an extraordinary sound between a snort and a sob.

  “Them!” she said with awful contempt. Then she caught at Jeremy’s arm with both hands. “And you mustn’t think as I’m not glad, Master Jeremy, for I h’am”

  “I’m sure you are, Lizzie.”

  “And your pie getting cold on the table, and me a-making a show of myself!” exclaimed Mrs Walker. She jerked herself up on to her feet, scrubbed her nose until it was an angry crimson, and propping herself agai
nst the door-post, enlivened Jeremy’s meal with funerary reminiscences culled from her own family. She broke off an account of her father’s obsequies to change his plate and bring him an apple turn-over, after which they seemed without any transition to have passed to the controversy between the rector and her Aunt Susanna as to the propriety of inscribing upon the tomb-stone of her Uncle Thomas (by marriage) the statement that he died beloved and regretted by all, it having been notorious for many years that the less said about the moral character of the said Uncle Thomas (by marriage) the better.

  Jeremy was not really listening. It felt odd to think that old Cousin Emily was gone. It felt odd not to have a relation in the world—odd, and a little chilly. It felt very odd indeed to have a house and a thousand a year.

  “And she says to him, she says, ‘What my pore Thomas did isn’t neither here nor there. H’everyone of us ‘as our faults,’ she says, ‘and that’s not to say as we expects to see them written on our tomb-stones,’ she says.”

  A house and a thousand a year. … It felt most awfully odd. Then suddenly, like a flash of light—Rachel.

  It meant that he could marry Rachel at once.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  IT WAS A LITTLE after this that Colonel Garrett said “Hullo!” six times very rapidly into his table telephone. He was just going to say it a seventh time and in an even louder tone, when Mr Smith’s leisurely, cultured voice came to him along the wire.

  “My dear Garrett, what a noise! You have waked Ananias.”

  “Hang Ananias!” said Garrett. “Look here, does that young man of yours write anonymous letters?”

  “I should not think so. But—er—may I ask what young man you are referring to?”

  “Ware—and you knew perfectly well.”

  “And—er—why should he write you an anonymous letter?”

  “Don’t know. I’ve had one. It struck me he might have written it.”

  “Are you coming to see me about it?”

  Garrett laughed his ugly barking laugh.

  “No, I’m not. I’m going mare’s-nesting.”

  “On the strength of this—er—letter?”

  “Yes. I’m probably making a fool of myself. You don’t know Ledlington, do you?”

  “Er—no,” said Mr Smith—“no.”

  “The letter invited me to examine three entries in the registrar’s office. Two births and a death. Do you know Farrow-in-the-Fold?”

  “My dear Garrett—no.”

  “Thirty miles from Ledlington. Local trains. I may get back to-morrow.”

  “How—er—cryptic,” said Mr Smith.

  “I’m to look up a marriage in the parish register of Farrow-in-the-Fold. I suppose you wouldn’t like to do it?”

  “Er—no,” said Mr Smith—“I don’t think so.”

  “It’ll be quite easy. All dates supplied. You’ve only to get there. As a matter of fact I’m going to send one of my bright young men, but I shall go to Ledlington myself. Now the question is, if your young man didn’t write me that nice chatty note about registers, who did? You’re sure he didn’t write it?”

  “Oh quite,” said Mr Smith, and heard Garrett pitch the receiver on to its hook.

  He turned to meet the beady gaze of Ananias, to whom the telephone was of never failing interest.

  “Awk?” said Ananias in a gently inquiring tone.

  Mr Smith scratched him behind the ear.

  “Wait and see, Ananias,” he said.

  An hour or two later Mimosa Vane was embracing Rosalind Denny. Embracing is perhaps too strong a word. Mimosa’s gloved hand just touched Rosalind’s shoulder, whilst her left cheek-bone approached Rosalind’s cheek, and a wisp of her platinum hair tickled it.

  “Darling!” she said, and withdrew. “I’ve only rushed in for the least possible moment. Time is too elusive—one can only hover! No, darling, nothing at all. This is one of my orange days—just the juice, you know—not even a cocktail. Sibylla says alcohol is too shatteringly fat-making.”

  She drifted to a chair and lit a cigarette. Rosalind thought she looked ghastly. She had a new face-powder of a greenish shade. Her large eyes were rimmed with mastic, and over her own pale mouth she had painted in two crooked orange lips. She wore a thin black dress under a fur coat, and a little shiny black hat with a scarlet quill. A bright chain made of rings of steel lay flat upon the bones of her chest.

  Rosalind wondered why she had come. She said with a sudden impulse of pity,

  “You do too much, Mimosa. Why don’t you rest?”

  Mimosa laughed her high, sweet laugh.

  “Glycerine” thought Rosalind. “That’s what it reminds one of. Horribly sweet!” She checked the thought.

  Mimosa was speaking.

  “Rest? Darling, how too devastatingly boring—and fat-producing! Nobody rests unless they’ve definitely given up having a figure! No, darling, I just rushed in to say I do hope you went to see Asphodel. So marvellous—isn’t she? You did go?”

  Rosalind’s feet were suddenly cold—her feet, and her hands.

  She said, “Yes, I went,” and hoped that her voice was all right.

  Mimosa fanned away the light cloud of smoke which hung between them.

  “Darling, tell me! What did she say? Isn’t she too wonderful?”

  Rosalind’s head lifted a little. A flavour of contempt came into her voice.

  “Well, to be quite candid, Mimosa, I wasn’t very much impressed.”

  Just for an instant the pale blue eyes narrowed between their artificially darkened lids. Rosalind had a curious impression of something fixed, hostile. And then it was gone. Mimosa’s glycerine voice was at its silliest and sweetest as she murmured,

  “My dear—how too disappointing! But you know, darling, if you won’t be offended with me for saying so, one has to do one’s part. She’s so ethereal, and if you went there in a material, questioning spirit—”

  “I thought it was all a trick,” said Rosalind. Her light, cool tone was gone. The words came with an angry rush. Her eyes stung with hot sudden tears.

  She got up and bent over the fire, putting on coal and hoping that Mimosa had not seen.

  Mimosa got up too, fluttered to her, slid a bony arm about her.

  “Darling! You are quite agitated! But why pretend to me? Sometimes when the veil lifts—darling, I know—too shattering—but wouldn’t it be a relief to tell me?”

  Rosalind eluded the thin, hard arm. She managed a creditable laugh.

  “Dear Mimosa, how amusing it must be to have an imagination like yours! I was only putting coal on the fire. And I don’t think we’d better discuss Asphodel, because if you think she’s wonderful, and I think she’s a fraud, we’re not likely to agree, and I hate quarrelling.”

  Mimosa sighed.

  “Just a little uncharitable, aren’t you, darling? I do feel we should have kind thoughts about each other. Don’t you? I always say if we were all kinder to one another, how much better the world would be. I said so to Vinnie Hambleton only this morning. You know, she’s practically off her head about Emery Stevens. Her maid says she’s taking drugs. My dear—heroin! She told my Louise. But of course you can’t believe all these maids say—can you? And she looks healthy enough, but there’s no smoke without some fire—is there? Perhaps it’s cocaine, not heroin. Too, too hard to get nowadays, but if you’ve got enough money you can get anything—and of course Vinnie’s rolling. They say her grandfather made millions out of an invention which he stole from one of his employees. But I don’t think one ought to repeat things like that. Do you? They say the poor man it was stolen from died in the workhouse. Vinnie’s the dearest thing of course, but I always think her ankles rather give her away—too, too self-made. Ankles must be born, don’t you think? Darling, I must rush! I’m meeting Cruffies.”

  Once outside the flat, Mrs V
ane did not seem to be in any particular hurry to keep her appointment. As on a previous occasion, she went first to a public call-office. When she got through, she said at once in a voice a good deal harder and less saccharine than the one she used on social occasions,

  “It is you? … Give the word then. … Oh well, you’re always saying ‘Be careful, be careful!’—Yes, I’m coming to the point, if you’ll let me. … Very well then, I’ve seen her. … Yes, all stirred up. … Oh, definitely, … Of course I’m sure. … No, she’s not going out to-night. I should ring up then. Evenings at home always give me the moaning blues. I don’t suppose she’s any different. Well, that’s all. I’d like that cheque.” She rang off, touched her face to an even sicklier shade of green, added a slight upward curl to the orange lips, and went upon her way.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  ROSALIND DINED ALONG. SHE did not really want to dine at all. She would have liked a tray in the drawing-room, but Perry was not the sort of parlour-maid who encouraged trays. It was her place to ring the dressing-bell, and Mrs Denny’s place to dress for dinner. When she had rung the dinner-bell, she expected Mrs Denny to proceed decorously to the dining-room and partake of a formal meal under her watchful eye. To-night Rosalind found Perry’s eye almost more than she could bear. What would Perry do if she were to scream or put her head down on the lace mat before her and weep away the hot, heavy tears which burned behind her eyes?

  She did not scream, and she did not weep. She took three mouthfuls of soup and helped herself to a square inch of fish, half of which she left upon her plate. A couple of grapes were more easily disposed of, and then she was back in the drawing-room again. She did not know why Mimosa’s visit should have shaken her so. It seemed to have brought back those horrible moments when she had heard Gilbert’s voice speaking through the medium’s lips. It was all a fraud. How could it be anything but a fraud? It was Gilbert’s voice. Such a frightful craving for Gilbert came over her that for the moment she no longer cared whether it had been fraud or not. She had heard Gilbert’s voice. If she were to ring up Asphodel, she might hear it again to-night—now. She was half-way across the room to the telephone, when Perry came in with the coffee. She set it down on its appointed table and made up the fire in a slow, deliberate manner. By the time she had gone out of the room and shut the door Rosalind’s impulse was dead, drowned under wave upon wave of black depression. Gilbert was gone, and no one could bring him back. She had to live her life without him. She had failed him. She had failed Jeremy.