Who Pays the Piper?

by Patricia Wentworth

  Cathy lifted her head again. She had a lost look.

  “I—can’t——”

  Susan had a stab of fear.

  “Why can’t you?” said Lucas Dale.

  Cathy began to shake. Between chattering teeth she stammered,

  “I—don’t—know——I didn’t take them—oh, I didn’t!”

  Dale shrugged his shoulders.

  “You see—that’s all she says. I did my best before you came, but she won’t speak. Well, she’s had her chance. I asked you to come here because I think it’s most likely she’s got the pearls on her. Either that or they’re in her room at the Little House. If she’s got them here, they’ll be on her or in her bag. Will you turn out her bag first, and if they’re not there, will you take her up into one of the bedrooms and search her? I want to be quite sure before I ring up the police. You see, I’m trusting you.”

  Susan walked over to the chair with her head very high.

  “Where’s your bag, Cathy?”

  It was Lucas Dale who answered.

  “It’s over there on her table. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind getting it. I don’t want to have it in my hands.”

  Susan fetched the bag—Cathy’s old brown bag which went everywhere with her. It was when she was coming back with it that Cathy started up and ran to meet her.

  “Give it to me!”

  “Cathy——”

  “You mustn’t open it——” The words were in a stuttering whisper. They chilled Susan’s anger. They chilled her to her bones.

  “Cathy——”

  “You mustn’t, you mustn’t, you mustn’t!”

  “Go and sit down!”

  Cathy had never heard this voice from Susan before. She went back to the big chair and cowered down in it as if for shelter.

  Susan went up to the writing-table. She faced Lucas Dale across it and opened Cathy’s bag. It had an inner compartment which shut with a clasp. The two sides of it were stuffed quite full of odds and ends. Susan took them out one by one—an almost empty purse, two handkerchiefs, three pencils, a pencil sharpener, two bills and a receipt from shops in Ledlington, a letter in a bright blue envelope, a shopping list, a yard of brown ribbon, a powder compact, lipstick and a little round box of rouge, some acid drops in a paper bag, a small square pincushion stuffed full of pins, a ring of safety pins. There seemed to be no end.

  Susan came at last to the inner compartment. With her fingers on the clasp, she heard Cathy take a hard-drawn breath. Her fingers were like ice as they opened the clasp. There were two little pockets, one of silk, the other lined with white leather. In the silk pocket there was a hair-net and hair-pins, in the other a snapshot of Roger Vere. It had been stuck on a piece of card, and at the bottom there was fastened on one side a spray of white heather, and on the other a snippet of curly black hair. Oh, poor Cathy! Susan glanced round with a jab of pity and relief. Cathy’s face was hidden again.

  Susan held the card up with its back to Lucas Dale.

  “It’s only a photograph. There’s nothing else.” She turned out the two little pockets as she spoke, and some dust with them. There was nothing else.

  Dale looked impassively.

  “Will you do the same with the rest of it?”

  It was when she took hold of the lining and pulled that the slit became visible. It ran down the side of the lining. She hadn’t noticed anything until she pulled the silk. It tore now with a small, sharp sound. She put her hand into the hole and felt the pearls.

  Dale had his eyes on her face. He had not meant to watch her, but he found himself unable to look away. Anger gave her a brilliance which fairly took his breath. Her colour glowed, her eyes shone. And then all at once everything hardened, sharpened. Her hand stayed where she had thrust it, and slowly all the colour drained away, the brightness left her eyes. It was like watching her die. There seemed to be nothing left. He leaned across the table and said in an agitated voice,

  “Susan—what is it? Don’t look like that!”

  She looked at him. Her hand came slowly back, holding a string of pearls knotted at either end, each pearl the size of a pea, smooth and iridescent. She moved her hand with the pearls a little towards him and dropped them down. She did not look at them. She groped for the bag and pushed it towards him.

  Lucas Dale took it up and turned it inside out. The loose pearls that were in the lining came pattering down. He swept them together, picked up a straggler here and there, and counted them.

  “Twenty—and twenty-five in the string. They’re all here.”

  Susan turned and went to Cathy. She felt as if she was bleeding to death. Her body was slow and stiff. Her mind had come to a standstill. Cathy and Lucas Dale’s pearls.… Lucas Dale’s pearls in Cathy’s bag.… Cathy saying, “You mustn’t open it—you mustn’t!” … But that was because of Roger’s photograph.… Was it? … The pearls were in the lining of Cathy’s bag.… These thoughts had been in her mind when it stopped. They stayed there without her having any power to change them.

  She came to Cathy and pulled her hands away from her face.

  “The pearls were in your bag.”

  Cathy stared up at her. A look of blind terror crossed her face. She put out a groping hand and slipped sideways to the floor.

  CHAPTER IX

  “Are you better, Cathy?”

  The brown eyes opened blankly and closed again. Susan felt a rush of pity and terror. Four years ago, when Cathy had been so ill, she had looked like that day after day for all those horrible weeks—just there, just on the edge of death, just living and no more. Her heart broke in her. She said softly,

  “Won’t you tell me about it—won’t you?”

  The eyelids lifted again. The eyes looked blankly. The eyelids fell. Susan said in an urgent voice,

  “I must talk to him. You’ll be all right, won’t you? Just lie still.”

  There was a sighing breath. She did not dare to wait. If he were to ring up the police, it would be out of his hands.

  They had carried Cathy into the recess where her writing-table stood and laid her down on the padded window-seat. She had come out of her faint almost at once, but she had not uttered a word. Susan dared not stay. She got to her feet, pulled back the curtain which screened the recess, and saw with relief that Dale had not left the study. He was standing by the hearth, his elbow on the chimney ledge, looking down into the fire. As the curtain slid back he turned, waiting for her. She came slowly to stand beside him and say in a faltering voice,

  “What are you going to do?”

  “That’s for you to say, Susan.”

  She looked at the burning logs.

  “That is very kind—very generous. I—I don’t know what to say. She’s ill. There must be some dreadful mistake, or else she didn’t know what she was doing. Cathy couldn’t do anything like that if she was herself—you must know that.”

  Lucas Dale said, choosing his words,

  “That would be taken into consideration in preparing her defence.”

  Her head came up. She said,

  “What are you saying? What are you going to do?”

  He was looking at her gravely and sternly.

  “Do you really expect me not to prosecute?”

  “Mr. Dale!”

  “You must forgive me if I don’t look at it quite as you do. It’s a pretty bad case, you know. She was in a position of trust, and I did trust her implicitly. She has abused that trust in the most flagrant way. The whole thing seems to me to have been quite cleverly calculated. Don’t look like that, Susan—I am bound to let you see my point of view. It’s not only the loss of the pearls, but it was just an outside chance my looking at them again like that. It might have been six months before I had them out—or longer. And who would have fallen under suspicion then? Monty Phipson, or Raby, or one of the servants. I’m not a suspicious man. After months had passed I couldn’t say or swear that my keys had never been left about, or that I hadn’t let Monty have them to fetch something fr
om the safe. The last person on earth to be suspected would be Miss Cathleen O’Hara, and that’s what she was counting on. How can you expect me just to pass it over and let her go to play the same kind of trick on someone else? If you’re kind to a criminal you may be letting a lot of other people down, and the way the law looks at it, you would be compounding a felony.”

  “You said——”

  “I gave her a chance before you found the pearls. If she’d owned up then and given them back, I could have believed she had given way to some sudden temptation and been sorry for it ever since. But you saw how it was—she thought she could get away with it. They were cleverly hidden, and she held right on. Well, there it is—she made her choice. And that was the last minute I was going to feel justified in letting her go.”

  Susan watched his face, and found no comfort there. He had the look of a man who has made up his mind. There was no anger—she would have had more hope if he had been angry. There was a settled purpose, and that purpose to—send—Cathy—to—prison.… Her lips moved very stiffly.

  “You said it was for me to say——”

  Dale said, “Yes.”

  He turned from her abruptly and went to the glass door by which she had come in. He opened it and stood there, letting the wind blow through. There was a streak of sun between grey clouds. There was a yellow crocus out below the window. He shut the door and came back.

  “Yes, it’s for you to say, Susan. I’ve got a duty to society, and a duty to the law, and a duty, as I feel it, to the other members of my household. But there’s a duty that one puts before all these. It may be right or it may be wrong, but there it is. It’s nature, and you can’t go against nature. If a thing like this happens in a man’s own family, he’s got a right to keep it in the family, and no one can blame him. I shouldn’t prosecute my wife’s cousin.”

  She had known what was coming before it came, but the shock was no less for that. A car on a straight road and another car coming right at it—the inevitable head-on collision. You know just when it will come and where. There is nothing to do but to wait for the crash. It was like that. At first just the hint of danger, then danger looming, coming nearer, nearer. Then the words, “I should not prosecute my wife’s cousin.”

  Susan walked to a chair and sat down. She closed her eyes and steadied herself as best she could to fight for everything that mattered to her in the world—Cathy, Bill, their little house, Aunt Milly, friends, the place they had lived in not only for her lifetime and Cathy’s but for all those generations that had gone before—men and women who had taken their name from King’s Bourne, lived out their lives there, and were remembered by cross and slab, by effigy and brass, in the churchyard and in the church under the hill—not many wise, not many noble, but a race of honourable people, faithful in their obligations, gallant in stress, kindly and upright. She had to fight for them, and she went into the battle shocked and dazed, her heart betraying her, because how can you think clearly or know what you should do when you love two people and they pull different ways?

  Lucas Dale had never admired her so much as when she lifted eyes that were dark with pain to his and said,

  “Will you sit down? I can’t stand any longer, and we must talk.”

  He moved the chair in which Cathy had sat, leaned back in it, and spoke more gently,

  “It rests with you.”

  It was some time before she said anything. When she did her voice was steady.

  “You have said that you care for me. I think you do. I am very grateful. I shall be grateful to you every day of my life if you will be generous about this.”

  “I don’t see it that way, Susan. You mayn’t think I’ve got a code, but I have. I won’t break it. If this is a family affair it can be settled in the family. If it isn’t it’s a case for the police. It’s for you to say whether it’s a family affair or not.”

  She took that blow, and came back with a pathetic courage.

  “Please, will you let me tell you about Cathy? She isn’t strong—she hasn’t ever really been strong. About four years ago she had a very bad illness. She very nearly died. They said then that she mustn’t ever have any strain or shock. If there were a case and she had to go into court, I think it would kill her. There must be some mistake, and it would come out in the end, but I don’t think Cathy would ever get over it. Mr. Dale—if you care for me at all——”

  He said harshly, “That’s not fair.” And then, “I want you to listen to me. You say if I care for you I’ll break through my code. If I was that sort of man I wouldn’t be worth caring for you at all. If I’d no more stuffing in me than that, do you think I’d ever have got where I am? Do you know what I was? A charity boy—no father, no mother, no name. You don’t get from that to where I am now by being soft, nor by giving up because a thing’s hard to get. The harder it’s been, the harder I’ve had to try, but what I’ve wanted I’ve got, all through. Don’t you think that you can turn me, Susan. No one ever has, and no one ever will—not when I’ve set my mind on a thing. What I want I get, and what I get I keep.”

  There was a pause on that. The room was very still. His last words said themselves over and over in Susan’s mind. She broke from them at last. Some colour came to her cheeks. She said in a stronger voice,

  “It’s not possible—none of it. Cathy couldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “Who did it then? The pearls were in her bag. She begged you not to open it. Why did she do that? She crouched right down in that chair and hid her face when you began to turn it out.”

  “There was a photograph there—a boy she’s fond of. She didn’t want anyone to know.”

  She saw him smile.

  “You can’t really believe that—or if you can, I can’t. What does it matter whose photograph she’s got? What’s the use, Susan? She did it, and she’ll have to stand by it, unless——”

  Susan’s face burned.

  “Blackmail?” she said, and felt her heart stop with terror at the change in his face.

  He looked like murder as he jerked her out of her chair and held her facing him.

  “Say that again and there will be no unless! Do you want me to ring up the police—now, at once? Because I will if you like—you’ve only to say so. Well, what is it to be?” He was rough in voice and action. His hands bruised her with their hard strength. But she kept her eyes on his. If she died for it she wouldn’t look away.

  “Let me go, Mr. Dale.”

  He let go of her at once, walked to the writing-table, and reached for the telephone. With his hand on it he looked back at her and said,

  “Well—make up your mind.”

  Susan looked across to the recess where Cathy lay. She hadn’t moved. Perhaps she wouldn’t move for hours. She had had these turns before—when her kitten had been killed by a strange dog—when a tramp had frightened her. She had lain stunned and dazed for hours, and afterwards she had been ill. The doctors called it shock. They had said, “Leave it to time.” The word was in Susan’s mind as she turned to Lucas Dale. She heard herself saying it out loud,

  “I must have time.”

  He left the table and came back to her. The gust of anger was gone. He said,

  “How much time? I could give you an hour.”

  “That’s not enough. Cathy is ill. I can’t ask her anything until she’s well again. It may be days. And sometimes she doesn’t remember—she didn’t when her kitten was killed. It’s shock.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give you days—you must see that. I couldn’t explain to the police why I had put off reporting the theft of the pearls. I can give you an hour. Would you like me to leave you alone here?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Is there anything you would like for yourself or for Cathy?”

  She said “No.”

  He went out and shut the door.

  CHAPTER X

  That hour was the strangest one in Susan’s life. She could not have told how it went. It was like the time in a
dream, when moments lengthen into ages or contract to a dizzy flash. She tried to rouse Cathy, to get an answer from her, but achieved nothing but a dull state of distress without coherent speech. Dr. Carrick had always told them to let her alone and she would sleep it off. In the midst of all that was so unreal she had the clearest picture of Bill’s father saying that in his warm, reassuring voice.

  She began to walk up and down in the long room. Two windows on to the terrace and the glass door between them. Everything grey and misty outside. The ray of sun had gone. She turned and walked back, leaving the windows behind her. The door on the right, Dale’s writing-table, the chimney-breast, the logs on the hearth fallen down in a bed of white ash. Above, on the panelling, Lazlo’s picture of Millicent and Laura Bourne. On the left the recess, Cathy’s writing-table. Cathy lying motionless on the window-seat very small and frail. She walked on to the end of the room. There was another door on the right. It led by a narrow passage to a back stair.

  Susan turned and came back again. Her eyes went to the picture. Millicent and Laura Bourne.… How lovely and serene they looked—Aunt Milly who was a fretful invalid—Laura who was dead.… She thought. “I’m twenty-two. I’m older than she was when she died.” She thought how easy it would be to be dead and not to have to break your heart.

  She stood there and thought about Bill——“I’ve got a right to break my heart for Cathy, but I’m breaking Bill’s heart too——” A small, cold voice answered her. It said, “He’ll get over it. Cathy wouldn’t. Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” Cathy could be broken like a leaf. Bill would suffer, but he wouldn’t break. She didn’t think about herself at all. There was no feeling there—it was all numb. She thought about Bill, and Cathy, and Aunt Milly. She thought Aunt Milly would crumple up if anything happened to Cathy. She sat down in the big leather chair and stopped thinking.

  The door near the windows opened. Mr. Vincent C. Bell looked in. When he saw Susan he came right in.