Death Knocks Three Times

by Anthony Gilbert

  When he left Greenglades John did not immediately return to the Railway Hotel. His brain was humming with impressions, with suspicions, with speculations on the future. It was a good thing he had remembered to give Miss Pettigrew his card. The old girl (by which he meant his Aunt Clara) certainly looked very dickey. If she died—when she died—Heaven to feel safe at last, go to a decent tailor instead of explaining that these ready-made suits are a godsend to the artist who hasn’t time to hang about in fitting-rooms. A service flat, a decent bottle of wine, the knowledge that you could ask another chap out without wondering what it would cost you. He saw himself casually hailing taxis, joining a good club. After all, no one would be surprised if she popped off any time. It couldn’t make much difference—except, of course, to a man like himself. He began to review this matter of the letters. They were a signpost all right—pointing to what? Say she died tonight, what would people suspect? Foul play? But there had to be a motive there. Surely an astute murderer, he reflected, would time his murder when there was no obvious motive. It rang in his head, shaping his reflections—no obvious motive.

  It was approaching midnight when he returned. The Railway Hotel didn’t pack up as early as Greenglades, and Crook was still sitting in the lobby.

  “Nice night,” he offered as John came in.

  “Yes. I’ve just been for a prowl along the front. Had a rather exhausting evening—my aunt and her old friend. Miss Pettigrew.”

  “How was Miss Pettigrew?”

  John looked startled. “I wasn’t aware you knew her.”

  “Great buddies,” said Crook, tranquilly. “Asks my advice.”

  “Does she take it?”

  “Ever know a woman not take something she could get for nothing?”

  John brooded a moment. Then, “I’m worried about my aunt,” he announced. No harm saying it to as many people as possible. “Looks to me as though she was breaking up.”

  “It’s a way they have in your family, ain’t it?” Crook agreed.

  “Of course she’s no chicken,” flared John, on the defensive at once.

  “And she may as well go while she’s still compos mentis.” Crook could play this hand with any one.

  “She can’t get much pleasure out of her life,” John argued, but Crook, who also appeared argumentative, said, “You’d be surprised.”

  John decided to change the subject. “I’m going back to town first thing in the morning,” he observed. “Got to get to work on this new book of mine.”

  “Birth of a masterpiece,” beamed Crook. “Ought to have Cecil B. de Mille around.”

  John gave it up. He didn’t stand an earthly chance with Crook. He said as he had to be up early he’d go to bed now, and departed forthwith.

  15

  THE chambermaid who waited on Floor Two, on which both Miss Bond and Miss Pettigrew were accommodated, was, in Mr. Hammond’s old-fashioned diction, not up to snuff. By which he meant that she wasn’t one of the elderly respectable women he liked best to employ but a smart modern young creature called Marlene, with platinum blond hair on her shoulders and painted fingernails. Her education, never of a very high standard, had been completed by twice-weekly visits to the cinema, and she made it clear that Greenglades was simply a stop-gap employment for her until she could find some way of evading the Control of Engagements Order. She hadn’t, she said frankly, much use for what was virtually an old-age pensioners’ establishment. True, these pensioners lived on what their relations had left them instead of being dependent on the Government, but that didn’t make them particularly generous about tips, and they expected a great deal more service for much smaller rewards than an ambitious girl could pick up at Warrens or the Metropole.

  “Nothing ever happens at Greenglades,” she confided to one of her numerous male escorts. “If the Day of Judgment was to sound overnight and they were all to drop dead in their tracks, you wouldn’t notice much difference except that they wouldn’t be able to yap so much.”

  On the morning after Miss Bond’s bridge party, however, some-tliing did happen. When she took the old lady’s early tea along to her room, she found the door locked. Miss Bond belonged to a generation that invariably locks its doors in hotels, and as invariably unlocks them before the arrival of morning tea. Today, however, there was no open door and no response to the girl’s repeated rapping.

  “Putting on her tovipee and fitting in her teeth, I dare say,” thought the irreverent Marlene, leaning against the door and balancing the tray precariously on one knee while she rattled the knob. But when even that effort met with no response a pleasurable sense of calamity began to invade her. Setting the tray down on a small table in the passage, she marched along to Miss Pettigrew’s room. The chambermaid’s abrupt announcement that, “Something’s happened to Miss Bond. Her door’s locked and there’s no answer,” provoked no gesture of dismay or astonishment.

  “No doubt she is in the bathroom,” said Miss Pettigrew coolly. (All the bedroom doors locked automatically on the outside when the occupants left their rooms.)

  “Well, she isn’t. That bathroom door’s open. I noticed as I went by.”

  “Then she is sleeping late.” “She’s sleeping like the dead, if she is.”

  “Dear me, Marlene. What a very melodramatic mind you have. Have you brought my tea?”

  Marlene immediately looked sulky. “It’s outside. What’ll I do about Miss Bond’s?”

  “She will do doubt ring when she is ready. In the meantime you might take her tea to someone else.”

  Miss Pettigrew reached out and began to envelope herself in the Jaeger dressing-gown that had originally belonged to her father and that she had inherited thirty years ago.

  “When I have had my tea I will go along to Miss Bond’s room

  myself. It is improbable that she has met with an accident, but her nephew did mention to me last night that she was not quite herself. I knew it was unwise to allow him to bring her up in the elevator, with a heart like hers.”

  She had taken her tray from Marlene’s hand, poured out the tea, and now began to drink it.

  “Go back and knock once more,” she said. Marlene felt a shade of hope. The old geezer was looking a bit gray about the gills. Perhaps something had happened. Not that an old girl like that dying of a weak heart was much fun. If she’d been found at the bottom of the elevator shaft it would have been a different matter—you could have speculated which of the others, all of whom, Marlene was convinced, hated her like poison, had pushed her there. She went back and banged so loudly on the old lady’s door that another door, a little farther down, flew open, and Miss Gadshill, in a pink-flannel dressing-gown, a pink shingle-cap, pink rabbit slippers and flourishing a pink plastic sponge bag, flew out.

  “What is happening?” she exclaimed, her poorly-fitting teeth chattering on their own account like an echo. “From the noise you are making one would think it was murder.”

  “P’raps it is,” said Marlene, in tones of deep relish.

  Miss Gadshill looked instantly delighted. “Miss Bond? Dear me, Marlene, you shouldn’t say such things. Can you not waken her?”

  “Don’t seem like it.”

  “But surely,” Miss Gadshill stooped her angular form to peer under her neighbor’s door, “her light is on.”

  “So what?” asked Marlene, pretending she had noticed it all along. “P’raps she’s had a stroke. Anyway I’ve made enough noise to wake the dead.”

  But that, it transpired, was precisely what she could not do.

  After some time, when still their knocks and calls aroused no response, Miss Pettigrew announced her intention of sending for Mr. Hammond.

  Mr. Hammond was very reluctant to use the master key and only Miss Pettigrew’s expressed conviction that something was wrong overruled his objections. There was a further delay when it was discovered that the key was on the inside of the door.

  “In the pictures,” breathed the ecstatic Marlene, her mind filled

  w
ith visions of the odious Miss Bond stabbed, strangled or hanging from a hook behind the door, “they sort of wiggle it out with a bit of wire.”

  Hart, the porter, showed unexpected skill in dealing with this contingency, and eventually the key was heard to tinkle to the floor. Mr. Hammond inserted the master key and Miss Pettigrew marched into the room.

  There could be no doubt that Clara Bond was quite dead and had been for several hours. A far less experienced hand than Miss Pettigrew could have told you that. She must have been overcome quite suddenly after she reached her room, for she had not begun to undress. She had fallen sideways on the bed, the big black reticule slipping from her limp hand.

  Mr. Hammond looked as disturbed as hotel managers always do ^vhen an unexpected death takes place on the premises, but Miss Pettigrew proceeded to reassure him.

  “Her nephew, who dined here last night, came to my room before leaving the hotel, to tell me he was anxious about her,” she told him. “He left his London address with me in case of emergencies.”

  “Did you notice anything out of the way last night. Miss Pettigrew?”

  “I cannot truly say I did. But I think she had something on her mind. Since her sister’s death last year she has not been quite herself, and of course she was not a young woman.”

  “Was she under a doctor?” continued Mr. Hammond, using the extraordinary colloquialism that all his countrymen understood at once. He devoutly hoped so. An inquest was always a bad advertisement for a hotel.

  “I don’t know that she had seen him at all recently, but she used to employ Dr. Munster. It was he who warned her about her heart. It was defective, you know. She invariably said she believed nothing a doctor told her, but I noticed she was careful about stairs and hurrying.”

  “Munster? We’d better get him to come in, though I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done.”

  Miss Pettigrew appreciated perfectly that the manager was far more concerned for the effect of this death on his hotel than on the dead woman’s account. It seemed to her a wholly reasonable attitude. You couldn’t expect any one to be particularly sorry that

  Miss Bond was no more; she had never tried to win love, and she hadn’t succeeded without trying.

  “If you will telephone to Dr. Munster,” she continued, “I will try and get in touch with her nephew. He told me he was returning to London today but he will hardly have started yet.”

  But when she was put through to the Railway Hotel she was informed that John had already left. Arthur Crook was her informant. “Went on the 8.55,” he said.

  “Dear me!” exclaimed Miss Pettigrew. “How time does run on. Ah, well, he will have to return immediately.”

  “Must be getting used to that,” said Crook in heartless tones. “The usual?”

  “Miss Bond was found dead on her bed this morning.”

  “On, not in?”

  “That is what I said.”

  “Knife in her throat?” gloated Crook.

  “It appears to be a heart attack. She collapsed before she could begin to undress.”

  “Sounds all right this time,” said Crook.

  “Just coincidence, again,” agreed Miss Pettigrew. Her tone was so acid that Crook could feel his own teeth begin to grate.

  “Unless he just talked her into her grave. But that ain’t an indictable ofiEense under British Law. He stayed late enough.”

  “A little after eleven. Yes, that was late for Miss Bond.”

  “He didn’t get back till close on midnight. Still, he said he’d been communing with the ocean. That might explain it. Well, I suppose I may as well follow his example and get back to London myself.”

  “You mean you are going at once?” Miss Pettigrew’s mingled astonishment and contempt jabbed Crook into saying: “It happens to be where I earn my living. Nobody’s paying me to string along in this case. ‘Course, if you rang me up to tell me you dropped a little dose of whatsit into her milk and you want me to show you were at the pictures at the time, I’m your man. But if it’s just for the pleasure of my company …”

  There was a brief pause. “Mr. Crook,” said Miss Pettigrew in a voice that would have frozen the phoenix, “we are speaking of a dead woman.”

  “So we are,” agreed Crook contritely. This frosty old dame was his sole connection with the affair, and for all his reckless threats, he had no intention of not seeing it through, and he reminded himself that he was sometimes called Mr. Cautious Crook, and this was one of the occasions when he should live up to his name. “What’s the doctor say?”

  “He has not yet arrived. I confess I am worried.” “No responsibility of yours, is it?”

  “In a sense, yes. It is—it was—my practice to go along to Miss Bond’s room for a few minutes before I undressed each night for a few last words with her and perhaps to discuss plans for the following day. Last evening Mr. Sherren came along to my room to say that she did not wish to see anyone, as she was tired. I confess at the time I had no reason to suppose the message anything but a genuine one, and indeed I have no such reason now. But I cannot help knowing that if I had followed my usual custom, in spite of what Mr. Sherren said, we might not now be faced with this sudden tragedy,”

  “How come?” inquired Crook, politely.

  “Had I gone along at eleven o’clock, which is the time Mr. Sherren left me, it might not have been too late to take some action which would have saved Miss Bond’s life. Of course, when she was discovered this morning, life had been extinct for several hours.”

  “You mustn’t be too sensitive,” Crook told her. “You don’t have to be your brother’s keeper.”

  “It is ironic to reflect that she asked me down here for purposes of self-protection, and it is while I am under the same roof that she has met her death.”

  “Life’s full of coincidences,” said Crook, comfortingly. “That’s what these highbrow novelists like John Sherren won’t admit. Look here, like me to come around? No, don’t thank me. Pleasure is mine.”

  He bounced off in a state of delightful anticipation. He knew there was nothing in it for him at all, but he reminded himself that outsiders do sometimes romp home.

  Before John returned to Brakemouth Dr. Munster had made his examination and passed sentence.

  “I suppose,” said Miss Pettigrew, with very much the air of being in charge of the situation, “any additional excitement might be responsible for this collapse?”

  Dr. Munster, who disliked Miss Pettigrew on sight and saw no reason why he should conceal the fact (she wasn’t a resident and was unlikely to come on his panel under any Social Security measure) said drily: “If you call an overdose of pheno-barbitone additional excitement—well, yes. But I can’t give a certificate, because that’s what she died of, and a coroner will have to establish how she came to take it.”

  And off he went, leaving Hammond a prey to the deepest gloom. Miss Pettigrew even more thoughtful than usual, and all the lady residents twittering with a pleasure they hardly tried to conceal. She’d been poisoned, she’d committed suicide, it was a bad conscience, it was history repeating itself; don’t forget her sister, there’s something in heredity after all …

  They hadn’t had such a good time since VE Day, when Mr. Hammond had stood everybody a drink in the bar, and served wine with dinner, all free of charge.

  16

  IT WAS becoming quite monotonous. Each time he came back from visiting an aged relative, John Sherren was, as it were, greeted by a summons to attend that relative’s inquest. It had happened in the case of the old Colonel, in the earlier case of unfortunate Isabel Bond, and now, as he lugged his suitcase up Crispin Street, having brought it by bus for economy’s sake as far as the corner, he found his landlady on the doorstep waving a telegram.

  Your Aunt Clara collapsed heart failure return immediately. Pettigrew.

  “Heart failure,” he repeated, and in a louder tone he added: “I had a hunch something was wrong. She was so very strange last night, as if—as if so
me spring of action had suddenly run down.”

  “She was quite an old lady, wasn’t she? And sometimes it’s a mercy when the call comes before they get helpless. I remember my dear mother …”

  “Quite,” said John. “I’m afraid this means I shall have to go back at once.”

  Mrs. Pringle laid affectionate hands on his suitcase. “You don’t stir outside of this house without you’ve something in your inside,” she assured him. “We don’t want you fainting by the road and yours is a delicate family, get giddy like your poor Aunt Isabel or took queer like the old lady you’ve just left. There was a telephone call, too, before the telegram, that was.”

  “Who did that come from?”

  “A Miss Letty Crewe, it sounded like. When Mr. Sherren arrives, says she, speaking ever so short, thought I was the housemaid, I dare say …”

  “Quite,” said John who knew his Mrs. Pringle. “What did she say?”

  “Same as the telegram. Come back at once, she said, and that’s all very well, I told her, but Mr. Sherren’s a gentleman with important work to do, and if the old lady’s passed on …”

  “Quite,” said John for the third time. “Did she actually say that?”

  “To tell you the truth she was a bit hard to hear, but I certainly thought she said something about a funeral, so I thought to myself if it’s a funeral someone must be dead, and it isn’t likely …”

  “Have you a time-table, Mrs Pringle?” inquired John. His heart was pounding with excitement. “This doesn’t surprise me, doesn’t surprise me at all. I must, of course, return at once.”

  “Now, come in, Mr. Sherren, and have a breather. Here’s the kettle boiling away, and here’s the milk and the sugar …”

  John found the time-table and began to look up trains. All over, he was thinking, Aunt Clara dead. Of course he must go down, try and get a word with Twemlow. A pity the old chap was always so antagonistic, offensive even … He began to wonder about his own future.

  “I’m sure you’re looking as white as a sheet,” said Mrs. Pringle. “Now, plenty of sugar, go on, help yourself, none of that nasty saccharine in this house. How were things in your hotel?” she added jealously.