The Watersplash

by Patricia Wentworth

  Yes, I think I do know the girl you were asking about. If she spoke of a Miss Ora she could hardly be anyone except Clarice Dean who is nursing an elderly lady in the village, Miss Ora Blake. The name is such an uncommon one, and your description of the girl fits Miss Dean very well. She has been down here before. She nursed Mr. Random of the Hall-he died just before we came-so she knows most of the people here. There is some idea that she is having a romance with Mr. Random’s nephew. But that is gossip, and perhaps I ought to cross it out, only if I do it will make my letter so untidy, and I haven’t got time to write it again. Don’t you think it is very difficult to be sure whether one is gossiping or not? In a village you know everybody so well, and naturally you take an interest in what is going on. John is rather strict about it, but one can’t be stiff and unfriendly, can one? And do you think it matters, so long as you only have kind feelings about the people? Dear Miss Silver, it was so nice to hear from you.

  Yours affectionately,

  Ruth Ball”

  Miss Silver laid the letter down on her lap. She thought, “Ruth would never be unkind.”

  And then the door opened and Emma came in with the tea-tray. A calm, ample person with a rosy country face and grey hair neatly brushed back from an open brow.

  “Now here’s your tea, and you’ll drink it up whilst it’s hot. I don’t suppose you had any lunch to speak of, so I’ve cut you a sandwich or two, and there’s honey to go with the scones. And here’s the evening paper. I’m in a couple of minds whether to let you have it, because you want to get that tea down inside you whilst it’s hot, but I suppose you’d be asking for it if I didn’t bring it along.”

  Miss Silver put out her hand for the paper. She began to say, “Emma, you spoil me,” but her eye was caught by a headline and the last word was never said. She straightened the paper out and read:

  GIRL DROWNED IN WATERSPLASH-STRANGE COINCIDENCE

  CHAPTER XVII

  The body of Clarice Dean was discovered by Edward Random. It was striking ten by the church clock when he came down to the watersplash and turned the ray of his torch upon the nearest of the stepping-stones. It showed more than he had bargained for-a woman’s hand lying palm downwards on the dark glistening stone. Just a hand, in the circle of the ray. That at the first glance. Then as he slanted the torch, the light picked up the line of the wrist, the drenched sleeve of a coat, the vague darkness of a body half covered by the water. She lay in the pool which had drowned William Jackson. The flow of the water had drifted her hand onto the sloped edge of the stone and kept it there, moving it a little, so that it looked as if it still had some feeble life in it. There was a moment when Edward had no certainty as to who the woman might be. She lay face downwards in the water, and it covered her. She lay still, but the hand moved slowly.

  He set his torch on the bank and went down into the pool. She was in the deepest part of it, but the deepest part did not reach his knee. It was a mere narrow pot-hole. If she had put her foot in it and fallen she would have come down in the shallows. She would hardly have drowned.

  She had drowned.

  He got her out-no such easy matter, with the bank slimy under foot-and when she was clear of the water he turned the torch upon her. He saw that it was Clarice Dean. He also saw that there really was no chance that she wasn’t dead. He felt her wrist, but there was no pulse. He had known that there would be none, but he had to make sure.

  In all the talk that followed, it was not to be denied that having got her out of the water, Edward could have done no more than he did, which was to lay the body face downwards on the slope so that the water might drain out of it, and then run to the Vicarage for help.

  But Clarice Dean was dead. Dr. Croft found Edward and the Vicar doing the best they knew with artificial respiration, but it was all to no end. The ambulance from Embank made its sinister journey once again, and before the village knew that there had been a second death Clarice Dean was gone from Greenings.

  Dr. Croft had to break the news to the Miss Blakes. At his knock on the door Miss Mildred came down to him in her old coat over a cheap flannelette night-dress with a candle in her hand.

  “What has happened, Dr. Croft? Why have you come?”

  The candlelight flickered between them. She peered at him through it.

  “Did you know that Miss Dean was out?”

  “No, of course not. She went to bed early-she said she had a headache. What makes you think she would be out? She never goes out so late as this-why should she? It is eleven o’clock!”

  “Very nearly. But that is beside the point. She did go out- I’m afraid there is no doubt about that.”

  “You are afraid? What do you mean? Has anything happened?”

  He said, almost with impatience,

  “Yes, it has. It will be a shock to you, and you had better keep it from your sister until the morning. Miss Dean has met with an accident.”

  “An accident? What sort of an accident? What has happened?”

  “She has been drowned in the splash.”

  Miss Mildred set down the candlestick upon the newel-post of the stair and said,

  “Impossible!”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  The old coat had fallen open, showing how scanty was the garment she wore beneath it. It had been white once but was now a dingy grey. A woman would have wondered how old it might be. How many years was it since anyone could buy flannelette? Dr. Croft, being a man, only thought with distaste that she looked as if she had come out of a slum, and wished his errand done. He said briskly,

  “Well, there’s nothing to be done about it tonight. The police will be round in the morning. They will want to know whether there were any signs of depression. Don’t touch anything in her room. They will have to go through her things. I’ll look in and see Miss Ora tomorrow. Goodnight!”

  Miss Mildred sniffed.

  “I don’t know where we’ll get another nurse,” she said in an acid tone.

  Dr. Croft shut the door with rather more force than it really required.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  By nine o’clock next morning everybody in Greenings knew that Clarice Dean had been drowned in the splash. After Dr. Croft’s housekeeper had walked along the street and spent twenty minutes in Mrs. Alexander’s shop a good many people had made up their minds that she had drowned herself for love of Edward Random. Miss Sims, it appeared, had thought she heard the telephone-bell ring last night in the doctor’s surgery.

  “It would be about a quarter past eight, and the Doctor still out, so I went down to answer it. But when I took up the receiver all I got was that Miss Dean on the line, talking to Mr. Edward Random. Ever so upset she sounded. I don’t know that I ever heard anyone worse, and her voice not a bit like her usual… Oh, yes, it was her. The telephone is right by the surgery window, and I’d only to push the edge of the curtain to see who it was in the call-box. The light isn’t good there-we all know that-but the surgery was all in the dark for I’d just run in like I was, and I could see that it was her. There was no mistake about that. And it was her voice too if it comes to it, only all upset the same as I said. ‘Edward,’ she says, ‘I must see you-I really must!’ And something about nursing his uncle, only I didn’t rightly get that bit, because I heard the doctor’s key in the door. And just as I was putting the receiver back, there was Mr. Edward on the line, and speaking that sharp you wouldn’t believe it. ‘Edward,’ she says, ‘I must see you!’ And him shutting her up and as angry as you please. Well, it’s my belief the pore girl just took and drowned herself. Stands to reason that’s what she must have done. You couldn’t drown in the splash unless you wanted to, not without you were drunk like William Jackson was.”

  But an hour later after old Mrs. Stone had been up to the shop a more sinister rumour began to spread.

  “Heard it with my own eyes. Very good hearing I’ve got, I’m thankful to say. Miss Susan had been in with an egg or two for Betsey after the bad turn she had Tuesday. U
p all night I was, and never thought she’d live to see the morning. Well, Miss Susan was there, as I was saying, and I’d just got the door open showing her out, when along come Mr. Edward and that Miss Dean. Acourse I didn’t know it was them, not at the first of it-only a man and a girl quarrelling, and her crying. And then there she was, calling out his name for everyone to hear. ‘Edward,’ she says, and calls him ‘darling.’ Holding on to him too. ‘Don’t be so angry!’ she says. ‘I can’t bear it!’ And, ‘Oh, you do frighten me!’ she says.”

  Mrs. Alexander frowned.

  “She hadn’t got any call to be frightened of Mr. Edward.”

  Mrs. Stone gave her a sideways look.

  “Well then, it seems she thought different, because that’s what I heard with my own ears. ‘You frighten me when you’re like that!’ she says, and he tells her to leave him alone. Well, maybe if he’d ha’ left her alone, it’d ha’ been better for her, pore thing. Frightened was what she was, and there’s no smoke without any fire.”

  “Mr. Edward wouldn’t hurt a fly,” said Mrs. Alexander.

  Mrs. Stone was large and shapeless. Winter and summer she wore a raincoat and a man’s cloth cap. She leaned on the counter and said,

  “Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t. And I wasn’t talking about flies neither. That girl was frightened, and if a man had spoke to me the way Mr. Edward spoke to her-well, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have been frightened too. And ‘darling!’ was what she said, and begging of him not to be so angry, and you won’t get me from it.”

  She went back to Betsey-a slow progress, because she met three or four more people on the way, and every time she told her tale Clarice became in retrospect more frightened and Edward Random harsher. The currents of village thought and feeling began to change. Girls have drowned themselves before now when a man has treated them badly. Clarice Dean might have drowned herself if Edward Random had treated her badly. But the word “frightened” began to crop up whenever two people stopped to talk to one another about Clarice Dean.

  She was frightened.

  Mrs. Stone said she was frightened.

  Miss Sims said she was frightened.

  They had both heard her talking to Edward Random, and she was frightened.

  She was frightened of Edward Random.

  And she had been drowned in the splash.

  They began to say to one another that she wasn’t the sort to be frightened for nothing. And if she was frightened, what was she frightened about? And, at the tail end of it, “There are other ways of getting drowned than by drowning yourself.”

  The police, in the person of Inspector Bury, came out from Embank to interview the Miss Blakes-Miss Ora in her best shawl, eyes bright with interest and quite becomingly flushed; Miss Mildred at her grimmest and most detached. They united in assuring him that Clarice Dean had seemed rather-“well, excited, Inspector, if you know what I mean.” This was Miss Ora, the more forthcoming of the two.

  The Inspector turned a shrewd grey eye upon her.

  “And when did you first notice this excitement?”

  “Oh, it was after lunch-wasn’t it Mildred? Yes, definitely after lunch. I know it was then, because I had just seen Mr. Edward Random go by, and I was rather wondering about that, because as a rule he goes by in the morning and doesn’t come back until late. Not as late as he was last night of course. I hear it was he who found the poor girl’s body, but that would be something quite unusual-I mean, his being so late. He is taking over from Lord Burlingham’s agent, you know, and it must be very trying for Mrs. Random never knowing when he is going to be in for a meal. And not as if she was his own mother after all-”

  “Now just a moment, Miss Blake. You say this excitement of Miss Dean’s became noticeable soon after lunch?”

  Miss Ora nodded.

  “That was when I noticed it. She was helping my sister to carry some of the things downstairs-not very convenient being obliged to use an upstair room for meals, but I am a sad invalid and cannot attempt the stairs. And when she came back she was all flushed and smiling, as if something pleasant had happened.”

  “Did she say what it was?”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t ask her of course. It doesn’t do to encourage too much in the way of confidences, does it?”

  The Inspector turned to Miss Mildred, sitting there in her shabby old clothes darning a stocking which had left its better days a long way behind. The darn she was imposing upon it was of a rigid nature. He reflected that it would be most uncomfortable to wear. He said,

  “You went downstairs with Miss Dean-”

  “She went downstairs with me.”

  He accepted the correction.

  “Whilst you were downstairs together did anything happen which would account for the excitement mentioned by your sister?”

  Miss Mildred sniffed.

  “Am I expected to account for every passing mood of a flighty girl?”

  “You considered Miss Dean flighty?”

  “Most young women are flighty. Their moods change from one moment to the next. One cannot be expected to account for them.”

  “Then whilst you were downstairs nothing happened which would account for a change in. Miss Dean’s mood?”

  She sniffed again.

  “I do not feel called upon to account for Miss Dean. As to anything happening, she went to the front door, and I thought she took something out of the letter-box.”

  “Took something out of the letter-box, did she? You only have the one post here, early in the morning, so if there was a letter for her after lunch, it could hardly have come by the post. Do. you think she really did get a letter, Miss Blake? You can see that it might be important.”

  “I am quite unable to say. She went to the front door, and I thought she took something out of the letter-box, but I did not see her do so. I was on my way to the kitchen with a tray, and I was not sufficiently interested in Miss Dean’s affairs to take any further notice.”

  He turned back to Miss Ora.

  “Well, madam, I wonder if you can help me at all. With regard to this letter, whatever it was, that Miss Dean took out of the letter-box. You have your sofa close up to the window. Would you be able to see whether anyone came up and dropped a note into the letter-box?”

  She shook her head regretfully.

  “Well, no-I’m afraid not. You see, this bay is really built out over the footpath. The pillars which support it are right upon the edge of the street. It is considered very quaint and attractive. Strangers who are passing through always remark on it, and one of them told me that there is a house near Guildford which has the same peculiarity. He said the famous beauty Miss Linley climbed down one of the pillars when she eloped with Sheridan. Now if you will come over here, you will see for yourself that the curve of the bay just screens our own front door.”

  He came to stand by the sofa, and when he bent his head to the level of hers he could see that what she said was true enough. The front door was out of sight. Anyone walking between those supporting pillars and the side of the house would be able to slip a note into the letter-box and Miss Ora be none the wiser.

  As he went back to his seat, she said in a consolatory tone,

  “I have a splendid view right up and down the street, you know. I really see everyone who comes and goes. It is only at just the one point that the view is interrupted.”

  He sat down, and engaged her in a long desultory review of all that she had seen and noticed during the course of the previous morning.

  “You see, Miss Blake, we should very much like to know a little more about that note. The person who left it here must have walked along the street and passed this house. You may have noticed him-or her, even if you did not witness the actual delivery of the letter.”

  Miss Ora beamed, informed him that she always noticed everything, and embarked upon a detailed description of all the comings and goings of the day before.

  Mrs. Random-Mrs. Jonathan Random, that was-Edward Random’s step
mother, had come down with a basket and gone into Mrs. Alexander’s shop, where she had remained for twenty minutes. “She can always spare time for a talk there, but too busy to come in and see me of course. And it wasn’t for what she bought either, for her bag was still quite flat when she came out.”

  Mrs. Stone had come up the street. “Likes a gossip too, and I’m sure I don’t blame her, living with that dreadful invalid daughter. At least they all call her an invalid, and I daresay her mother has made her one, waiting on her hand and foot as she does, but if you ask me, I don’t believe there’s very much wrong with her, and I daresay she could get up and do an honest day’s work if she wanted.”

  Mrs. Stone did not appear to be at all a likely person to have left the note. Difficult to imagine that she could have anything to communicate which would either raise or depress a young woman’s spirits. When it appeared that she had not even passed the house, he was put to it to possess his soul in patience, but possess it he did. Sifting out all the odds and ends of what could hardly be called a statement, most of the people whose life histories Miss Ora touched upon and whose characters she dissected could be ruled out for the same reason as Mrs. Stone -they had not actually passed the house. It was therefore impossible that they should have delivered the note. Of those who had passed the house, there were three or four men on their bicycles who came home to their dinners and afterwards returned to their work. These also could be ruled out. There was Jimmy Stokes, who had bowled an iron hoop from one end of the street to the other, with his mother calling out to him that he would be late for school-but he was never out of Miss Ora’s sight.