Althea was having to hold her up. She said,
‘Yes, he’ll go. Nicky, you’d better. It’s no good trying to talk to her now, but I think you’ll have to help me get her back to the house.’
Nicholas took a step towards them and Mrs Graham cried out,
‘No – no! Don’t dare to touch me! Don’t dare!’
Althea spoke only just above her breath.
‘You’d better go – I’ll manage. Mother, you really will make yourself ill. If you won’t let Nicholas help you, just lean on me and come back to the house. You don’t want to stay here, do you? Let me get you to bed and make you comfortable.’ Nicholas stood where he was. If she wouldn’t let him help her she wouldn’t, and that was that. It wasn’t the slightest use talking to her. It never had been, and it never would be. The only argument to be used against her was the argument of the accomplished fact. Once Althea was his wife she would have to give in. And they were to be married tomorrow. There was a cold fury in his heart as he wondered just what chance there was of that plan being carried out. Mrs Graham would certainly not stick at making herself ill if that was the only way she could keep them apart. Well, if she could fight, he could fight too. He wasn’t going to stand for it – not a second time. Not, as he had said when they had met in Sophy’s little room, not if he had to smash everything in sight! Not if he had to snatch Althea away by force! At this moment he felt capable of anything. He felt as if he could pick her up in his arms and walk away with her over the rim of the world. He was hers, and she was his, and nobody was going to part them again.
FIFTEEN
ALTHEA TOOK HER mother in and got her to bed. To a constant stream of reproaches, strictures and dismal prognostications she opposed a silence which was neither wounded nor stubborn but quietly impervious. She administered sal volatile and filled a second hot-water-bottle with careful efficiency, but she did not speak except to say such thing as, ‘Are you warm enough?’ ‘Are you comfortable?’ ‘Can I get you anything else?’ And finally, ‘Good night, Mother.’ It was as if a sheet of sound-proof glass had shut her in. She and Nicky were on one side of it, her mother with her petty tyranny, her self-assertion, and her reproaches on the other. She was aware of her there, of her gestures, of her efforts to control, to wound, but it was like seeing something a long way off – the sound and the fury did not reach her. There was a barrier which they could not pass. She stood behind it and was safe. There was nothing now that would make her change her settled mind. She would marry Nicky in the morning, and she would send for Emily Chapell. There were no barriers any more and the prison doors were wide. She lay down in her bed and was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow.
Mrs Graham lay awake and added this wakefulness to her other grievances against Althea. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep, and it was very bad for her not to be able to sleep. Sensitive people need a great deal of rest, and she was a highly sensitive person. She had often told Dr Barrington how sensitive she was, and he had not failed to agree with her. She had been subjected to an intolerable ordeal, and it would take time for her to get over it. Even if she hadn’t caught her death of cold – the night air, so treacherous – she had been obliged to go to the top of the sloping garden and mount the steps of the gazebo. It was true that she did not feel any ill effects as yet, but they might be all the worse for being delayed. At the moment she did not really feel ill at all, only restless and as if she would not be able to sleep. Actually, she did not want to sleep. She was very comfortable and warm. She wanted to lie here and think what a bad daughter Thea was and how underhand she had been – taking up with Nicholas Carey again and slipping out to meet him in the middle of the night! It came to her suddenly and with intolerable force that she might have slipped out to meet him again.
Disgraceful behaviour! Really disgraceful behaviour!
Suppose Nicholas had not gone away when he was told to go. Suppose he had waited in the gazebo. Suppose he had waited for Thea. Suppose they were there together now. She really couldn’t endure the thought. She got out of bed, slipped on her black coat and went across the landing to the bathroom. She wouldn’t have worn a coat instead of a dressing-gown if there had been anyone to see her. She considered it a most slatternly habit. She had a very pretty pale blue quilted dressing-gown, but the colour was so pale that it might be seen if she leaned out of the bathroom window. There mightn’t be anyone in the gazebo to see her, but if there were, the black coat would be safer.
The curtains were still pulled back as she had left them. She came up close to the window and as she lifted the latch of the left-hand casement and pushed it wide she thought she saw a light in the gazebo.
She thought she saw it, and she thought that she had seen it – but when she leaned right out she could not see it at all. There was only the shadowy insubstantial darkness with nothing to break it. She stayed where she was and did not move. The darkness remained unbroken. And then just as she was beginning to feel the chill of the outer air she saw the light again. It came and went in the space of a moment, but this time she was certain that she had seen it. There was someone in the gazebo. The light just showing and fading again could be a signal. Thea’s windows looked this way. Mrs Graham craned sideways until she could see them. They stood wide as they always did, but there was no light in the room behind them and no one moved there.
She turned and went back to her room and put on the shoes which she had taken off. She did not stay to dress herself or to put on her stockings. She had on her black coat and skirt, and she took the two scarves which she had worn before, the chiffon one for her head, and the gauzy woollen one for her neck. Since there was a light in the gazebo, it meant that Nicholas had not gone away and Thea had either joined him already or would do so at any moment. Mrs Graham shook with anger. They thought they could make a fool of her, but she would show them! Thea putting her to bed with a hot water-bottle, giving her sal volatile, saying good night in a soothing voice as if she was a child – she would show her! She was so angry that she didn’t feel as if she would ever want a hot-water-bottle again. The front door was, of course, locked and bolted. She took the key and dropped it into the pocket of her coat. Then she picked up Thea’s flashlight from the hall table and went out of the back door, locking that too and taking the key. Now if Thea wanted to leave the house she would have to get out of a window!
She came up the paved path to the steps which led to the gazebo and stood there listening. There was someone there. Her hearing was very acute – she could hear that this someone moved. And then, screened by a man’s body, she saw the light again. It would be Nicholas Carey waiting here in the dark – waiting for Thea to come to him! She went noiselessly up the steps and stood on the threshold.
He had his back to her – he hadn’t heard anything. Well, she would give him a fright! She said in a high clear voice, ‘How dare you, Nicholas Carey!’ It was her last conscious action.
SIXTEEN
ALTHEA WOKE FROM a dreamless sleep. She felt rested. Yesterday seemed far away. It didn’t seem to matter. She looked at her watch and saw that it was half past six. There was a lot to be done – Emily Chapell’s room to be got ready, and something prepared that could be quickly cooked for lunch. It was their wedding day, hers and Nicky’s. Everything must go smoothly.
She went to the window and looked out. There was one of those weeping mists. Sometimes they turn into rain, but more often they lift and give place to a cloudless day. She stood for a moment listening to the drip from the leaves, from the trees, from the plants in the border. Then she went into the bathroom, found the water hot enough to take a bath, and dressed herself. She put on an old brown skirt and a yellow jumper. The Sungleam certainly had brought out the lights in her hair. She thought it looked nice, and hoped that Nicky would think so too. Then she went downstairs and unbolted the front door. She was about to unlock it, when she found that the key was gone.
It couldn’t be gone. It must have fallen out of the
lock, only she didn’t see how it could have done that either. If it had, it would be on the polished floor or under the mat. She took up the mat and shook it, and she looked in every possible and impossible place on the floor. As she moved the two hall chairs and the table and lifted the mat at the foot of the stairs, she was expecting every moment to hear her mother’s voice calling out to know why she was making so much noise. The key wasn’t anywhere, and no voice called from Mrs Graham’s room.
Suddenly and sharply it came to Althea that her mother had taken the key. With her lips pressed together and a heightened colour she went through the house and found the back door locked and its key gone missing too. What a silly trick to play – what a silly childish trick. She turned, ran quickly up the stairs and, coming to her mother’s door, noticed for the first time that it was only closed, not shut. There was no chink between door and jamb, but the catch was not engaged. At a touch of her hand the door swung in and she saw the empty bed.
It did not occur to her to be alarmed. It wasn’t until she turned and saw the bathroom door wide open as she herself had left it that the first faint stirrings of fear began. She stood in the middle of the landing and called,
‘Mother – where are you?’
There wasn’t any answer. The house had an empty feeling. She called again, and her voice came back to her with a shaken sound. She ran downstairs to look in the dining-room, the drawing room, the downstairs cloak-room, the kitchen, pantry, larder, and then ran up again to search the bedroom floor. By the time the postman’s knock sounded on the front door she knew that there was no one in the house but herself.
She went back to her mother’s room and opened wardrobe and shoe-cupboard. The black coat and the skirt which she had hung up herself at something short of midnight were gone. The shoes which she had put away with her own hands were gone.
Her mother had gone out.
For a moment Althea felt perfectly stupefied with surprise. That her mother should have risen before seven o’clock on a foggy morning and have gone out, locking both doors behind her and taking the keys, was perfectly incredible. It became not only incredible but alarming when she discovered that, though the shoes had been taken, the stockings and under-clothes still lay on the chair at the foot of the bed neatly covered by a spread of blue silk brocaded with mauve and silver. A further search disclosed the fact that no dress or suit was missing from the wardrobe, but the vest and night-gown which Mrs Graham had been wearing, her fleecy blue bed-jacket and the two scarves, were gone. They were gone, and she was gone. Impossible to escape the conclusion that she had left the house with bare feet thrust into outdoor shoes and a skirt and coat pulled on over the things she had been wearing in bed. Only an emergency could account for such a course of action, but for twenty years it had been Althea to whom the task of dealing with emergencies had been delegated. It came home to her with terrifying force that in this emergency her mother had turned away from her. She had not rung her bell, she had not called out, she had not come to her. She had put on a coat and a pair of shoes and hurried out of the house, leaving it locked up behind her.
Just for a moment the room swung round. Althea caught at the foot-rail of the bed and held on to it till everything was steady again. She could think of only one thing which would have taken her mother out – one thing, or one person. She must have thought or supposed that Nicholas was still in the garden or the gazebo. She might have thought that Althea would slip out – that they meant to meet again. But if that was what had taken her out, it must have all happened hours ago. She would not, she could not, have supposed that Nicky would return between six and seven in the morning. No, she had gone in the dark and she had gone in haste. But she had not returned. More than seven hours had passed since midnight, but she had not come back.
Althea ran down the stairs and got out of the kitchen window. The mist lay heavy on the garden. She couldn’t even see the gazebo until she was halfway up the path. She couldn’t see it clearly then. It was just a shadow against the shadowy hedge. It was in her mind that her mother had come out to make sure that Nicholas had gone. She had come out in a hurry, and than she had had an attack of some kind and fainted and not been able to get back to the house. This was the worst thing that came to her. She went up the steps into the gazebo and saw her mother’s body flung down on the right-hand side of the door.
There was a solid oak table in the middle of the room. There was a wooden bench, and some deck-chairs stacked against the wall. The floor boards were dusty and in the corners there were cobwebs. There was the body of Winifred Graham. It lay on its face, bare ankles showing beneath the black cloth coat. From the very first moment Althea had no doubt that her mother was dead, but she knelt down, found an ice-cold hand and wrist, and felt for a pulse that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there for hours. She went on kneeling on the floor of the gazebo whilst the intolerable certainty of this made its way along the channels of thought until everything else was blotted out. She got to her feet with just one instinctive feeling. She must have someone to help her. She must call Dr Barrington.
When she looked back on it afterwards there was a dull background of fear and confusion like a sea under fog, and rising out of it, strangely and horribly distinct, the things she would never be able to forget. Her hand in the pocket of the black coat, feeling for the keys. Her own voice without any expression speaking to Dr Barrington on the telephone – ‘Will you come at once? My mother is dead,’ and the surprised protest in his voice when he said, ‘No!’ Something moved dully behind the numbness in her mind. He hadn’t expected her mother to die. Did that make it more her fault, or less?
When he came into the house it was she who was calm. She could move about but she didn’t seem able to feel anything. Dr Barrington was a big man, and he had been in practice for thirty years. It was he who ought to have been calm, but he wasn’t, he was very definitely upset. She thought, as she had sometimes thought before, that he was very fond of her mother, even perhaps a little in love with her. He was going towards the stairs, when she stopped him.
‘She isn’t up there,’ she said.
He turned.
‘Down here? You haven’t told me what happened.’
‘I don’t know. I found her in the gazebo at the top of the garden.’
He said in a stupefied voice,
‘In the garden? What do you mean?’
‘I found her there. She was dead. I called you up.’
His face worked angrily.
‘You ask me to believe that she went out into the garden at this hour and in this weather?’
‘I think she went out in the night. She – isn’t – dressed…’
He stared, as if she had said something monstrous, then turned and led the way through the house to the back door. They went up the path without a spoken word. When they came to the gazebo she put her foot on the bottom step and drew it back again. He went past her, and she stood there waiting for what he would say – for what she knew he must be going to say. She knew what it would be, but to hear it said aloud would be like a blow, and just for a moment she held back from it. But when the words came they were not what she expected. They were quite dreadfully and incomprehensibly worse. He stood in the doorway and said in a terrible voice,
‘It’s murder – she has been murdered! Who did it?’
SEVENTEEN
MISS MAUD SILVER had finished her breakfast, but there was a second cup of tea on the table beside her and she was taking a little longer than usual over the more frivolous of the two newspapers for which she subscribed. She was reflecting on the rapidity with which news is transmitted, and wondering what prompted the selection of such items as ‘Film Star Weds Fifth Husband,’ and, ‘Mother Says I Love My Baby Son,’ when the telephone bell rang from the next room. She put down the paper and, neglecting her cup of tea, went through to answer the call. A voice which she did not recognize spoke her name. She did not recognize the voice, but sh
e was immediately aware that its owner was quite desperately afraid. There is the fear that makes the voice tremble, and there is the fear which makes it rigid. The voice which said, ‘Miss Silver…’ was stiff with fear. When she said, ‘Who is speaking?’ there was a pause before it said,
‘Althea Graham. I saw you yesterday. Something dreadful has happened. My mother is dead.’
Miss Silver was aware of the force which controlled the words. She said,
‘If there is anything I can do to help you…’
Althea said in that unnatural voice,
‘They say she was murdered. Will you come?’ The line went dead.
Miss Silver did not attempt to recover the connexion. She congratulated herself on having taken Althea Graham’s address, and she went into her bedroom and packed a suit-case. She might be required to stay, or she might not. Certainly that poor girl must not be left alone. Having just completed a most exciting case, she had beent hoping for an interval in which to catch up with her correspondence, but this was not an appeal she could neglect. Within twenty minutes of the time when she had taken up the receiver she was seeing her suit-case into a taxi at the Marsham Street entrance to Montague Mansions and saying goodbye to Hannah Meadows who had come down to see her off.
The case already referred to having been of an extremely lucrative nature, she decided to drive the whole way to Grove Hill.
She arrived to find Dr Barrington gone and the police in possession. The local Detective Inspector informed her that a couple of officers would be coming down from Scotland Yard, beyond which he had nothing to say, except that Miss Graham would be wanted for questioning when they arrived, and that she ought not to leave the house. She was in the drawing-room, he added, and stood aside for Miss Silver to pass.
Althea turned round from the window, her face white and strained. It was hard to recognize her as the girl who had left Montague Mansions yesterday, her eyes bright with hope. She said,
The Gazebo Page 10