Fear by Night: A Golden Age Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  Gale Anderson was certainly very pale, but he had been so pale before that it was impossible to say whether he was paler now. There was a pendant light in the middle of the room. He touched the switch which lit a couple of brackets over the mantelpiece and turned to face his employer.

  “It’s very good of you to tell me all this, sir.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” said Elias with a grim twist of the mouth. “I’ve been good to myself all my life, and I’m keeping right on. I don’t want you and Hilda to be thinking it’s time I was out of the way, and maybe giving me a helping hand. I’ll die when I’m due to die and not before.” He took a bunch of keys out of his dressing-gown pocket and flung them on the floor. “If you’ll open the third drawer on the left of the table you’ll find the draft of my will. The original is in my lawyer’s safe where no one can get at it. You can go through the draft at your leisure, unless you like to take my word for what’s in it. I’ve got another great-niece besides Hilda—her name’s Ann Vernon—and I’ve left my money to her. I’ve never seen her, because I quarrelled with her mother before she was born. If I saw her, I should probably dislike her as much as I dislike Hilda. At present I don’t, so I’ve left her my money—provided she outlives me. If she doesn’t, Hilda gets it. But I shouldn’t waste my time making love to her on the off chance.” He picked up his tumbler and drained it.” Don’t you want to read the draft?”

  “I don’t really feel it’s my business, sir,” said Gale Anderson.

  “Willing to take my word for it, are you? All right—I don’t want you any more. You’d better go and tell Hilda she’s wasting her time too. You’ll both need to marry money, so you’d best go courting where it’s to be had. There’s nothing coming to either of you from me, unless my niece Ann manages to smash herself up before I’m through.”

  Gale Anderson went out of the room without haste. He found Hilda Paulett in her own sitting-room on the ground floor. It was a dingy place and dingily furnished—old chairs that had been cast from the drawing-room; curtains of faded repp; a Brussels carpet whose pattern had almost disappeared; and an aged piano with flutings of discoloured green silk.

  She looked up as he came in, and his face frightened her.

  “Oh, Gale! What is it?” she said.

  He shut the door and leaned against it. It was a minute before he spoke. When he did so, his voice was under control.

  “Why did you lie to me about the will?”

  The colour flew into her face.

  “I didn’t!”

  “I think you did. You told me he’d left his money to you.”

  “Hasn’t he?” The words came with a gasp.

  Gale Anderson leaned against the door. He said coolly and quietly,

  “What made you think he had?”

  She came a step or two towards him and then stopped, twisting her hands, her colour coming and going and her breath uneven.

  “Gale—what’s happened? You don’t tell me. Has he altered his will? I saw the draft. I swear the money was left to me—I swear it!”

  “You saw the draft?”

  “I swear I did! It was the day he signed the will. When Mr. Everard had gone, Uncle Elias gave me his keys, and he said, ‘This is the draft of my will. I’m keeping it for reference. Put it in the third drawer of the writing-table, and mind you lock the drawer.’ So I went over to the table, and whilst I was putting it away he had a most frightful fit of coughing, and I thought I’d take a look and see if I could find out what he was doing with the money. His chair was turned round to the fire, so I was right behind him.”

  “Go on,” said Gale Anderson.

  “I got the paper open, and it was all that awful lawyer’s language, but I made out that he was leaving everything to ‘my great niece,’ and then it got down to the bottom of the page and I didn’t dare turn over, so I put it away quickly and locked it up and gave him back the key. That was good enough, wasn’t it?”

  Gale Anderson straightened himself up and came towards her. He took her by the shoulder, and she looked up at him in a puzzled, frightened way.

  “Those words, ‘my great-niece,’ came at the bottom of the page?”

  Hilda nodded.

  “What’s wrong—what’s happened?”

  With a turn of the wrist he pushed her away.

  “You fool! Didn’t you know he had another great-niece?”

  She stumbled against the piano and caught at it to steady herself.

  “Oh! You hurt me!”

  “Do you expect me to say I’m sorry? You blazing fool! Did you hear what I said? There’s another niece, and you don’t get a penny.”

  She looked up wide-eyed, her full lips trembling.

  “Gale—you didn’t marry me for that? Gale, I didn’t know—I swear I didn’t! Oh, Gale!”

  He said, “Be quiet!” and went to the fireplace and stood there looking down at the dusty paper between the bars.

  She watched him, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief and every now and then drawing a quick breath as if she wanted to speak but lacked the courage. When at last he turned round, the words broke out.

  “Oh, Gale, are you sure? Don’t I get anything?”

  “Not unless something happens to Miss Ann Vernon,” said Gale Anderson.

  Chapter Two

  Ann Vernon came up the steps of the Luxe with her chin in the air. If Charles Anstruther had been waiting for her, he would have reflected with a little stab of amused admiration that it was just like Ann to look as if she had bought the earth, in a dress which even to the male eye was tolerably out of date, and to cock her hat at an extravagant angle just because it had obviously borne the heat and burden of the summer.

  Charles, however, was about a mile away. He was, for the moment, very much engaged with a pale, weedy young man whose uncertainty as to the respective functions of the brake and the accelerator of a very elderly car had caused him to shoot violently out of a side street. The consequences to Charles’ car had been of such a nature as to stimulate his natural powers of invective to the uttermost. It was a hot day. A rich smell of petrol hung upon the air. There was the usual crowd. The pale young man dithered. Charles surpassed himself.

  And in the lounge of the Luxe Ann Vernon began to feel justly annoyed. She was ten minutes late for lunch. Charles should have been at least ten minutes early. She had never kept him waiting less than quarter of an hour. On the face of it, it looked as if Charles was a bit out of hand.

  Ann pressed her lips together firmly, took a slow look round, and then sat down with her back to the door in a recess behind a palm-tree and half a dozen hydrangeas. If Charles chose to be late, he could look for her. If he was more than five minutes late, he wouldn’t find her at all. She toyed with the thought of sending him a telegram. Something on the lines of “Sorry forgot.” Alternatively, she might ring him up—“It wasn’t to-day I was lunching with you?”

  “But I’m frightfully hungry,” said the part of Ann that had no proper pride—“frightfully, frightfully, frightfully. I don’t know who the idiot was who had the bright idea of calling bread the staff of life, but I bet he never tried leaning on it—not with all his weight, so to speak.” Ann had. It was Wednesday. Since the previous Saturday she had breakfasted, lunched, and supped on dry bread, and she positively ached for the fleshpots of the Luxe. If Charles didn’t come in five minutes, she would fade out of the side door, walk for about a quarter of an hour, and then come back again all late and haughty to find, she hoped, a champing Charles. Hang Charles! She didn’t in the least want to get hot, and even hungrier than she was now. For one thing, it is terribly hard to be haughty when you are hot. Charles had to be frozen, and to freeze another you must be cool yourself.

  The five minutes was nearly up. She was just going to lean sideways to look at the clock, when from the other side of the hydrangeas a voice said,

  “A pity you can’t marry her.”

  Ann stopped being interested in the clock. Theoretically, eaves-dropping
was a thing that you did not do. Actually, what a fascination there was in catching the little stray bits of other people’s stories which came to you suddenly in trains, buses, restaurants, and crowded streets. You didn’t know the people, so it didn’t matter to them.

  Ann felt a passionate interest in the voice from the other side of the hydrangeas. It was a man’s voice, pitched very low.

  “What a pity you can’t marry her,” it said. And then, “You’re sure about the will?”

  There was a little tinkling of glasses. There were two people there. Ann couldn’t see a thing, but she heard another voice say,

  “Of course I’m sure. Don’t speak so loud.”

  This was too intriguing. Loud? The words had been barely audible, the voices so drained of tone as to convey no sense of individuality. Both voices might have been the same voice, only they weren’t, One had answered the other with that fantastic “Don’t speak so loud.”

  Ann was quite desperately interested. When you are alone in the world, you must be interested in other people or else you begin to die. Ann was very much alive. She leaned against a blue hydrangea and listened. The hydrangea tickled her ear. She heard the second voice say,

  “She must be got away before she knows.”

  The first voice didn’t say anything. The glasses chinked. The second voice went on.

  “If he dies, the whole thing will be in the papers. She must be got away before she knows.”

  They were drinking something with ice in it. Lovely! Ann’s tongue felt exactly like a dry biscuit. Lovely clinking ice! Hang Charles!

  The first voice said,

  “He’s never seen her?”

  The second voice said,

  “And he’s not going to. You must get her away at once.”

  “And then?” The words were hardly words at all. There was no sound behind them. Yet Ann had heard them.

  All at once she wasn’t hot any more; she was cold. A horrid little shiver ran over her. She didn’t want to listen any more. She wanted Charles to come. “And then?” Those two words, which she couldn’t really have heard, seemed to hang upon the silence. It was a horrid silence. The other voice did not break it. Only after an intolerable minute there was a scraping sound as if a chair had been pushed back.

  Ann stood up, and as she did so the second voice spoke again, just a little louder: “Well, devil take the hindmost!” and she heard footsteps going away.

  For a moment she stood where she was, because she was actually feeling as if she could not move. When she looked round the hydrangeas, there was nothing to be seen except two chairs and a table, and a couple of empty glasses.

  Chapter Three

  Charles arrived full of apologies, but even more full of the damage to his paint and the enormities of a system which loosed half-witted invertebrate rabbits upon the highways in superannuated heaps of scrap iron.

  “He calls the thing a car!” said Charles, still pale with fury. “Said he was learning to drive it! Will you have grape-fruit or hors d’œuvres? The thing would have dropped to pieces where it stood if it hadn’t been for the rust! I can’t think how it ever started, and I don’t know now why it stopped short of smashing my petrol tank! Oughtn’t to eat hors d’œuvres, you know—you’ll spoil the rest of your lunch.”

  Ann took a delicious mouthful of sardine and egg. Lovely food! Lovely, lovely food—and lots of courses still to come! She smiled forgivingly at Charles and spoke the exact truth.

  “I’m starving,” she said.

  “All right,” said Charles, “put it away. I love to see you eating. You’re about the only girl I know who does. I took a young thing out the other night, and she dined on four cocktails and two spoonfuls of grape-fruit. Most embarrassing for me, because I’d been playing golf and was all set for a good square meal.”

  Ann ate every scrap of her hors d’œuvres. There was Indian corn, and little button mushrooms, and Russian salad, and cucumber, and sardine, and anchovy, and egg, and a fat green olive. When she had finished the last grain of Indian corn she felt better. Charles’ face came into focus again and stayed there. It was much more comfortable like that. She hoped he had not noticed anything, but for the first few minutes or so the room had been full of little dancing sparks, very horrid and dazzling, with Charles’ face coming and going in the middle of them like a conjuring trick.

  The waiter changed her plate and gave her a thick creamy soup with asparagus tips in it. After that there was going to be salmon, and cold pie, and pêche Melba. She smiled so sweetly at Charles that he very nearly lost his head, and only saved himself by immediately plunging into anecdote. He would certainly propose to Ann before lunch was over, but common decency forbids a host to offer marriage with the soup, because if the girl says no—and Ann was quite certain to say no—there is bound to be a blight over the rest of the meal. Besides, he had better tell her about Bewley first. He finished a story rather lamely, and said,

  “I’m putting Bewley up for sale.”

  Ann laid her fish-knife and fork together upon an empty plate. Hors d’œuvres, soup, salmon—and she felt as if she had only just begun. She hoped there would be a very big helping of pie. Could you ask for a second helping at the Luxe? Charles had said something about Bewley. He was repeating it with that quick, dark frown of his.

  “Bewley’s got to go.”

  Why didn’t she say something? Was it going to make a difference? Would she take him with Bewley, and say no if Bewley had to go? Did he want her if she was like that? He didn’t know the answers to the first two questions, but he knew that one. Whatever she did and whatever she was, he wanted Ann. Lord—how he wanted Ann! He said sharply,

  “Why don’t you say something?”

  Ann found something to say. She said,

  “I’m sorry”; and then, “Is it because of money?”

  Charles saw Bewley under the August sun—dark woods, moorland purple with heather, a blue edge of sea, security, five hundred years of possession, the oaks that were there when the Stuarts reigned and an Anstruther had ridden out to die at Marston Moor He said,

  “I can’t keep it up. The whole show’s dropping to pieces—bottom falling out of everything. It’ll have to go.”

  “You should look out for an heiress,” said Ann lightly.

  If she did not speak lightly and quickly, her voice might shake, and Charles might think—when really and truly it was only the dry bread, and walking the soles off her shoes looking for a job.

  Charles smiled, and she would rather he had frowned.

  “It’s Bewley that’s up for sale, not me.”

  “She might be an enchanting heiress,” said Ann.

  Charles agreed in the most reasonable way.

  “She might.”

  Ann smiled. The pie had arrived. It was a lovely helping. Pastry was very, very filling. There was jelly. There were truffles. There were peas, and surprisingly young potatoes. She tried to keep her mind upon food, and how lovely it was not to be hungry any more. If Charles thought he could work on her feelings with something on the lines of “Bewley’s mine to sell, but I’m yours,” well, he’d better think again. A horrid dangerous little traitor thought kept bobbing up at the back of her mind. For twopence it would start signalling to Charles, the little beast. She boxed its ears, speared a truffle, gazed at it with dreamy affection, and said,

  “You’d much better look for an heiress.”

  “Thanks,” said Charles, still in that reasonable tone.

  Ann found another truffle.

  “Seriously,” she said, “what’s wrong with an heiress?”

  “I don’t want one, thank you.”

  “Bewley does if you don’t. I suppose you’ll fall in love with somebody some day. Why shouldn’t you fall in love with a girl who’s got some money? She might be a heart-smiter. There’s nothing the least heart-smiting about being poor, you know. It’s very deteriorating, because you have to keep on thinking about money all the time—horrid sordid things
like, ‘Will it run to a bus fare?’ or ‘Can I have butter to-day?’ Everyone ought to have so much money that they never have to think about it at all. You’ve no idea how nice I should be if I had a thousand a year.”

  “It would take more than a thousand a year to save Bewley.”

  “Isn’t there any way of making it pay?”

  “Not without capital.”

  “Can’t you let instead of selling?”

  “What’s the good if I can’t ever go back? Besides, everything’s going to rack and ruin—cottages, fences, everything. It’s a hopeless show.”

  Ann said, “I’m sorry.”

  Charles went on talking about Bewley. Perhaps he found it a relief. Perhaps it was only because he had always found it astonishingly easy to talk to Ann.

  Ann for her part found it quite easy to listen. She was feeling soothed and peaceful. She finished her pie and ate pêche Melba in a fond, lingering manner. Charles had a nice voice. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to sell Bewley after all. If he married an heiress, she wouldn’t be able to lunch with him any more. It had been a frightfully good lunch. She began to feel quite certain that she would get the Westley Gardens job. She needn’t hurry, because her appointment wasn’t until a quarter past three. It was going to be all right.

  She smiled at Charles and said,

  “You’ve got a positive network of aunts and cousins and people. Would you like to find me a job?”

  Charles was slightly taken aback. He had been telling her about the death duties—three lots in ten years, enough to smash anyone. It took him a moment to switch over to the question of a job.