Dead or Alive

by Patricia Wentworth

  “What about O’Hara? Did you ever find out what happened?”

  Garratt frowned. When he frowned, he was quite hideous.

  “O’Hara? They got him. Dead. A year ago.”

  Bill wound the horsehair slowly round the finger with the scar. When the black had crossed the white three times, he said,

  “Is he dead? Are you sure?”

  “Sure? Of course I’m sure! Why? What’s eating you?”

  “Mrs O’Hara doesn’t seem sure,” said Bill slowly.

  Garratt’s voice became furious.

  “You been seeing her? What does she say?”

  Bill pulled the horsehair tight over the scar. By pulling it very tight he could make it go round a fourth time. He said,

  “Yes, I’ve seen her. We’ve known each other a long time. She isn’t sure.” The horsehair broke and he shook it off on to the floor. “Look here, Garratt—what happened?”

  Garratt shrugged—not the neat French lift of the shoulders, but a sideways jerk which was all his own.

  “Knife in the back. Sandbag.” He shrugged again. “I wasn’t there. They got him somehow.”

  “He was on a job?”

  Garratt nodded.

  “What job? Where?”

  “What’s the good of digging it up?”

  “I want to know. I want to know, Garratt.”

  Garratt sat down on the arm of a chair, thrust his hands into his pockets, and swung a restless leg.

  “Some people want to know everything!”

  Bill nodded. Except for the play of finger and thumb he had not moved till now. His attitude was one of repose, but to those steel-pointed eyes of Garratt’s the stillness of the long frame was the immobility of control and not of relaxation. He wasn’t moving, because he wasn’t letting himself move. He was holding his muscles from movement, and he was holding his voice from expression. Only when he had said, “I want to know,” there was a sudden heavy weight upon the word.

  Garratt stared at him and said, “Why?”

  “Because I do.”

  There was a short pause. Then Garratt laughed.

  “All right, you can have it! It’s damn little. You know what O’Hara was like. Brilliant in spots. Erratic all the time. Close as a clam.” He shrugged. “You can’t run intelligence work by rule of thumb, but O’Hara—” He shrugged again with that jerking movement of the shoulder. “I can do with a man being a law to himself, but O’Hara wasn’t that. He was a series of revolutionary outbreaks. Bound to come to grief sooner or later.”

  “What was he doing when he came to grief? How did he come to grief? And how do you know he came to grief?” There was a little break between each of the three questions, but there was no break in the pertinacity of Bill Coverdale’s manner.

  “I told you he was on a job,” growled Garratt. “And if you want to know what the job was, you’ll have to want, because I don’t know myself. Here’s the whole bag of tricks, and you can make what you like of it. The Foreign Office Intelligence don’t touch crime qua crime, but when crime slops over into politics, or politics slops over into crime, it’s our job. International crime is always on the look-out for a chance to exploit international politics. That was the Vulture’s* stunt. We got him, but we didn’t get the people who worked the show under him. One of them’s a damned clever woman, and she slipped through our hands. We got one of the men the other day, but the show’s still running. O’Hara picked up the trail of the people who are running it in this country. At least that’s what I think. Officially he was doing something else, but last time I saw him he dropped a hint and then shut up. Noting more out of him but ‘Wait and see.’ But he was on to something. Something big. Bit too big. It smashed him. If he’d had the sense to tell me what he’d got on to, we might have made a haul. As it was, they got him, and they got away with it.”

  “Mrs O’Hara doesn’t think he’s dead.”

  Garratt kicked the leg of his chair.

  “She doesn’t, doesn’t she?”

  “She came to see you?”

  “She came to see me,” said Garratt. “And she told me a cock and bull story about someone having put a marked newspaper in at her letter-box—letters with ink circles round them, spelling ‘I am alive’ or some flapdoodle of that sort!”

  “Why should it be flapdoodle?”

  “The answer to why is because,” said Garratt. He laughed rudely. “My good Bill, what would be the point of O’Hara sending his wife that sort of tripe?”

  Bill kept his temper. Garratt was an offensive brute, but he was used to him. He was a cousin in some seventeenth or eighteenth degree. He was an old friend and a good friend, but he had never had any manners.

  “She says that herself,” he remarked.

  “Then it’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever heard her say. There couldn’t possibly be any point about it. It was either a hoax, or she’d had a go of hysterics and done it herself.”

  Bill shook his head.

  “I don’t think so. I’ve known Meg a long time—she’s not like that. Now look here, Garratt, you won’t believe what I’m going to tell you, but I’m going to say it all the same. You shan’t say afterwards that you were kept in the dark.”

  “All right, go ahead.” Colonel Garratt’s little eyes were intent.

  Bill told him about the letters on Meg’s hearth-rug—chopped up pieces of writing-paper to make the word “Alive.”

  Garratt said nothing. He jingled the contents of his pocket and lifted his eyebrows, but he said nothing.

  Bill told him about the blank envelope which had contained a maple leaf with the word “Alive” pricked out on it.

  Garratt’s eyebrows came down and he stopped jingling. He said,

  “The girl’s batty!”

  Bill wasn’t angry. It wasn’t any good being angry with Garratt. He said,

  “No, she isn’t,’” and left it at that.

  “All right,” said Garratt, “trot out the exhibits—Daily Sketch, bits of notepaper, blank envelope, dead leaf. I suppose the leaf’s dead if O’Hara isn’t.”

  Bill smiled quite cheerfully. There had been a certain amount of thin ice about. Now that Garratt had smashed it, things felt more comfortable.

  “There aren’t any exhibits. Meg put the Daily Sketch in a drawer—her writing-table drawer—but it went missing the day she found the letters on the hearth-rug. The paper that had been used for them was in the same drawer.”

  “And someone broke in and burgled the leaf, I suppose!” Garratt made a face. “This what you call evidence? It’s sheer lunacy!”

  “O’Hara was an odd chap,” said Bill slowly.

  Garratt got there in a flash.

  “You mean he might be playing cat-and-mouse with her. What terms were they on?”

  Bill didn’t answer that at once. Then he said,

  “You’d better know just where we are. I’ve cared for Meg for ten years. She’s never cared for me. She married O’Hara. He made her damned unhappy. Now she doesn’t know whether she’s free or not. He was a cruel devil—it would be like him to keep her like that, not knowing.”

  Garratt jingled his keys. “It might be.… O’Hara was like that.”

  Bill went on speaking.

  “It’s an abominable position. She can’t even get probate.”

  There was something sticking in his mind about those papers in the bank. No, it was a packet of some sort. Meg didn’t know if there were papers in it, she only thought there might be. He didn’t know why they stuck in his mind, but they did.

  Garratt grinned.

  “Do you expect me to believe that O’Hara had anything to leave? I suppose she wants to be sure she’s a widow. She was a fool to marry him—but women are fools, especially girls. Now look here, Bill—O’Hara’s dead. I told her so when she came to see me. He’s dead, and he’ll stay dead. The body they got out of the river in December was his all right. Stripped—and ordinary identification impossible, but there had been an old break o
f the right leg. I happen to know O’Hara broke that leg about five years ago. We didn’t identify him at the inquest because it didn’t suit our book. We were still hoping to pick up the trail he was on. We most particularly didn’t want any headlines in the papers. What Mrs O’Hara wants to do is to go and see her lawyer and get leave to presume death. We’ll back her up—now. There needn’t be any publicity. Tell her to see her lawyer at once. All this about letters, and leaves, and snips of paper is either a hoax, or it’s hysterics. O’Hara’s as dead as Julius Caesar—she needn’t worry.”

  He got up, went over to the other side of the room, clattered at a drawer, and came back with an untidy notebook in his hand. He sat down again on the arm of the chair and flicked at the crumpled pages.

  “Here you are—October ’33. First entry about O’Hara on the 3rd. He was due to report, and he didn’t report.… October 4th—rang up Mrs O’Hara. O’Hara missing. She wanted to know where he was. So did we. We gave it another forty-eight hours, and then we began to make enquiries. Nobody had seen O’Hara since eight o’clock on the evening of the 1st, when he walked out of his flat. Nobody’d seen him. Nobody’d heard from him. He never turned up, and he never will.” He shut the note-book with a snap. “You tell Mrs O’Hara to see her lawyer and get on with it!”

  Bill Coverdale was sitting up.

  “You say nobody saw O’Hara after the first of October?”

  “One Oct: thirty-three,” said Garratt laconically.

  “Well—I saw him.”

  “You?”

  “I. And I can fix the date, because I sailed for South America next day, and I sailed on the fifth.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Dead sure. But you can verify it if you want to.”

  Garratt fished a pencil out of his pocket and sucked the end of it.

  “All right, if you’re sure. You saw O’Hara on the fourth. That’s four days after anyone else did. Where did you see him? What was he doing? Who was he with?”

  “He was in a taxi,” said Bill Coverdale. “It was somewhere short of midnight, because my train was a bit late, and it was due at eleven.”

  “Where were you coming from?”

  “King’s Cross. I’d been up north, and I’d run it fine, so I was in a hurry. I was sailing the next day. I was held up at a crossing, and I saw O’Hara go by in a taxi. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, and barring that it was somewhere between King’s Cross and Piccadilly Circus I can’t say where the hold-up was. I just didn’t think anything about it.”

  Garratt scribbled in his note-book.

  “You’re sure it was O’Hara?”

  Bill nodded.

  “Oh, yes, it was O’Hara.”

  “And it was a taxi, not a private car?”

  Bill shut his eyes for a moment.

  “Yes, it was a taxi—one of those green ones.”

  Garratt scribbled again.

  “You’re twelve months after the fair. We might have got on to the taxi if we’d known at the time. Was he alone?”

  Bill Coverdale got up and walked to the window. Like Garratt he frowned at the hygienic fiats, but unlike Garratt he did not see the bright blank windows or the staring concrete. He saw O’Hara in a taxi at midnight—O’Hara with every feature clear and distinct, and beyond him, close at his shoulder, a woman. The anger which he had felt then swept over him again. To have Meg for his wife, and to go chasing off with that sort of girl! He tried to visualize her and failed.… Yet he had had the impression that she was that sort of girl. There must have been something to give him that impression.

  Garratt repeated his question impatiently.

  “Was he alone?”

  And with that Bill turned back to the room again.

  “No, he wasn’t. There was a girl with him.”

  “See her face?”

  “I suppose I did. I can’t describe her.”

  “You’re being damn useful!” said Garratt with a growl in his voice. “All this is about as much use as a sick headache. You’re sure there was a girl?”

  “Yes, I’m sure of that.”

  “You wouldn’t know her again, or anything like that?”

  Bill was half turned away. He was frowning deeply. Behind that impression of his there must be something if he could only get hold of it. He said without knowing what he was going to say,

  “I never said I wouldn’t know her again.”

  *See Danger Calling.

  IV

  Bill Coverdale walked back to his hotel. It seemed pretty fairly certain that O’Hara had been dead for the best part of a year. That being the case, the next thing to do was to follow Gamut’s advice and take any steps that were necessary to get O’Hara pronounced dead legally. Garratt seemed to think there wouldn’t be any trouble about it.

  He began to wonder how soon he could ask Meg to marry him. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to give her things. He wanted to take her out of London. He had a picture in his mind of an open car, and himself and Meg, and the luggage in behind, and nothing to stop them going anywhere they chose. October could do some pretty good weather for touring when it gave its mind to it, and the weather this year seemed to have got into the habit of being fine. They could go to Scotland. They could go to Wales. They could go to Cornwall. They could go anywhere they chose.

  Bill indulged this dream for a little, and then woke coldly. He hadn’t had the faintest reason to suppose that Meg would marry him. Why should she? “She wants looking after. She’s never wanted you to look after her. If she had, she wouldn’t have married O’Hara. If she had, she’d have married you five years ago.” That was when he had first asked her—on her twentieth birthday. He hadn’t asked her before because she was so young and it didn’t seem fair, but lots of girls married at twenty. Meg had just laughed at him.

  “Bill darling—how silly! I know you much, much, much too well, and I’m much, much, much too fond of you. I don’t want to marry for ages and ages, but when I do, I expect it’ll be someone I don’t know a bit, so that I’ll have all the thrill of being an explorer—you know, the ‘I was the first that ever burst into that silent sea’ sort of feeling.”

  “You wouldn’t be,” Bill had said with sturdy common sense.

  “I don’t suppose anyone ever is, but it’s a most thrilling romantic feeling.”

  “And I’m not romantic.”

  “Darling angel, how could you be? I’ve known you since I was fifteen.”

  That had always been the burden of it—she knew him too well, and she liked him too much. And she married Robin O’Hara whom she did not know at all.

  Bill walked, frowning, into a telephone-box and dialled in. Presently Meg’s voice came along the wire.

  “Yes—who is it?”

  “Bill,” said Bill Coverdale.

  “Oh—hullo, Bill!” Her voice, which had been a little breathless, sounded pleased.

  “I want you to dine with me.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “You don’t need to think—I’m doing the thinking. Where would you like to go? I thought about the Luxe.”

  “Bill, I really don’t think—”

  “I thought we might do a theatre. What have you seen?”

  “Nothing.”

  “All right, I’ll call for you at a quarter to seven.”

  “Bill, I haven’t got any clothes.”

  “Well, the best people don’t seem to be wearing them much.”

  “You don’t mind if I’m terribly out of date?”

  “I’ll bear up, I expect. Quarter to seven, Meg.” He rang off.

  He was rather pleased with himself because he had resisted the temptation to tell her that it didn’t matter what she wore, because she always looked nicer than anyone else anyhow. It didn’t do to say that sort of thing if you could help it. You might feel like a door-mat, but so sure as you let a girl know it, she started walking all over you. Meg would be much more likely to marry him if he kept his end
up. From which it will be perceived that that devout lover Mr William Coverdale was not without a spice of the serpent’s wisdom.

  Meg hung up the receiver. She ought to have said no, but it was such ages since she had been out anywhere—such ages, and ages, and ages. It would be nice to dine with Bill, nice to get out of the flat, and very, very nice not to have bread and margarine for supper. Last week there had been cheese, but now there was so little money left that it was bread and margarine, and scraps at that, with the tea-leaves saved from breakfast to make something you could pretend was a cup of tea. Of course she ought to have given up her telephone the minute she lost her job, but it seemed like the last link with her friends. Only everyone had been away holiday making, so it hadn’t really been much good after all, and now that people were coming back again, the telephone would have to go, and she would have to sell something to pay the quarter’s rent and the calls she had had.

  She pushed all that away. She was going to dine at the Luxe and go to a theatre. The question was, what was she going to wear? She hadn’t anything that was less than two years old. It was two years and a month since she had married Robin O’Hara, and it hadn’t run to any new clothes since then.

  She went into her bedroom, opened the wardrobe door, and stood there considering.… Not her wedding dress. She had worn it many times since, but looking at it now, all those other times faded away.…

  For better, for worse—for richer, for poorer.…

  The better and the richer had faded out in the first month, leaving her only the worse and the poorer part.

  No, not her wedding dress.

  There wasn’t much choice really. She had never liked the pink lace. Pink wasn’t her colour, but Robin had said he thought he would like her in pink. And then when she wore it, he had stared at her coldly and told her she was losing her looks. No, she certainly wasn’t going to wear the pink.

  It would have to be the black georgette. She put it on, and thought it didn’t look so bad. Uncle Henry had given her a cheque, and it had cost a lot two years ago. Meg looked at herself in the glass, and thought she was too thin for black, and too pale. She could put on some colour, but the little knobs on her spine showed all the way down the open back. She shifted the hand-mirror this way and that, and thought what ugly things bones were, and what a pity the dress was cut so low, and then slid off into thinking what a lot it had cost, and how out of sight was out of mind. There was Uncle Henry with lots of money, and she’d lived with him from the time she was fifteen to the time she married, and he had paid all her bills without a murmur and given her nice fat cheques for her birthday and Christmas, and things like that, and then the very minute she married Robin he didn’t seem to mind what happened to her any more—just vague and affectionate when they met, but no more cheques. It was a whole year since she had seen him now, and he hadn’t even bothered to answer her letters. He had just faded out, and Bill might say what he liked, she wasn’t going to write again and have that Cannock woman sending one of her white mouse letters and saying how busy Mr Postlethwaite was, and how important it was that he shouldn’t be disturbed.