And So To Murder

by John Dickson Carr

  ‘She was drinking what?’

  ‘Well, she had a beer-bottle in her hand,’ Jimmy defended himself, ‘and she looked funny. I ast Corky O’Brien, did he think she was a secret drinker? He said he expected she took dope, more like. His old man’s a hop-head, so he ought to know.’

  ‘Jimmy!’

  ‘O.K., miss; skip it.’

  The Rev. Canon Stanton had once preached a powerful sermon on the insidious influence of American talking pictures on the youth of Great Britain. Monica evidently did not share these views: she crossed Jimmy’s palm with silver.

  Anyway, she had undoubtedly missed Messrs Hackett and Fisk now. She stood at the top of the hill, looking down towards the Old Building in the shallow green valley, and her feelings were bitter. She could not understand why it had seemed so very important to find out where she had seen that page-boy before. It had seemed so; for three weeks it had nagged at her subconscious mind; but why? After all, she did not suspect Jimmy of –

  Of having poured fiery acid into her face, or fired a bullet at that face from a few feet away.

  It was twenty minutes past five o’clock. Though the sky to the west was still clear and mellow, the Old Building had begun to retreat into shadow. Birds bickered in the vines outside it. This was the first time, it occurred to Monica, she had been at Pineham without having Bill Cartwright within call in case she needed help.

  But there was Tilly: Tilly was a host in herself.

  Descending the hill, Monica went into the Old Building. The writers’ rooms were in a corridor branching off immediately to your right as you entered the front door. You went up three indoor steps; and the corridor, brown linoleum and white walls, stretched away to an elm-shaded window at the far end. First there was Tilly’s room, then Monica’s, and then Bill’s.

  Monica met nobody: the porter on duty in the lobby had gone. In passing she tapped at Tilly’s door, but she got no reply.

  Her own office was also empty. It lay neat and swept and dusky in the afternoon light, with the gleam of the lake beyond the windows. The rubber cover was on the typewriter; manuscript lay in a trim sheaf held down by a book.

  Monica glanced instinctively in the direction of the bullet-hole in the wall, which she had covered with a calendar. Then her eyes, deceived for the first time, flew back towards the typewriter.

  There was something lying on top of the rubber. It was a squarish envelope, pink in colour, addressed with blue-black ink in a handwriting which was only too familiar. Evil, breathing malice as clearly as though someone had whispered aloud in the room, was another anonymous letter.

  3

  If Monica had been asked how she really felt about the persecution of the past weeks, she would have answered that she refused to think about it. And this in a sense was true. She did not think about it: she only fought it. Just as Miss Flossie Stanton could not have prevented her from writing the book she wanted to write, so her anonymous friend at Pineham could not drive her away from here.

  But in her heart she was frightened of Miss Flossie. And she was a hundred times more frightened of the person who used sulphuric acid.

  She went over to her desk, tore open the envelope, and read the letter.

  Who was sending these things? What difference did that make? Somebody was; and the very feel of the letters to the touch was unpleasant. This particular one was no better or no worse than the first two, except for the last two lines.

  It’s all up now. You will be seeing me soon in the flesh, Bright-eyes. And will you be surprised?

  For a time Monica did not move. Her cheeks felt hot and her heart had begun to beat with slow, heavy rhythm.

  ‘Tilly!’ she called out.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Tilly!’ stormed Monica.

  Still clutching her handbag under her arm, she went to the communicating door, tapped on it, and opened it. The other office was empty, but Tilly could not be far away.

  A hissing, bumping noise of steam in a kettle issued from the partly open door of the cloak-room in the far right-hand corner of Tilly’s office. Tilly, as usual, was boiling water for one of her eternal pots of coffee. As usual, she had forgotten it: which she did on an average of half a dozen times a day, until a denser and more acrid cloud of steam warned her that she was burning the bottom of the kettle.

  Monica went to the cloakroom, and turned off the gas-ring. The bottom of the kettle was not burnt through, though its metal, white-hot, had a powdery flakiness. Not a pleasant sight.

  ‘Tilly!’ Monica cried amid the steam.

  She burnt her fingers on the kettle, and pushed it aside. In the wall over the gas-ring was a panel, once a service-hatch in the days when the Old Building had been a country house. Monica thought she heard a step outside it. She drew back the panel and glanced out, but there was nothing except the darkening corridor.

  Monica left the cloakroom. This must stop. She must go up straight away to Mr Hackett’s office on the floor above (if he were still there) and apologize. This must stop. She walked back past Tilly’s desk in the middle of the room, and in doing so she bumped against the standing ash-tray which got in your way beside the desk. The ash-tray tilted and spun; its glass dish clattered; Monica caught it as it fell; and, in that flash of revelation, her heart jumped into her throat.

  She was looking down at the half-open drawer of Tilly’s desk. Setting right the ash-tray, Monica first took a quick glance round, and then dragged open the drawer. There were some untidy typed sheets of manuscript inside, scored and interlined with corrections in blue pencil. One line of writing curved up and ran clear along the side of the paper.

  Monica stared at that sheet of manuscript.

  Then she picked up the sheet, and ran with it into the other room. Dumping her handbag on the desk, she put the sheet of manuscript on the typewriter. She held the anonymous letter beside it.

  They were the same.

  Tilly’s handwriting.

  Very quietly, rather dazedly, Monica drew out the chair and sat down. She felt that she had to do something, to act somehow, against the nightmare that was closing in. She acted in a mechanical way to keep herself from thinking. Opening her handbag to get a handkerchief, her fingers slid over the cellophane wrapper of the box of cigarettes she had bought at the station.

  Her eye next fell on the red-leather needlework-box, in which she kept cigarettes, beside the typewriter. She opened it. It was empty, and she turned it upside down to shake out a few loose crumbs of tobacco. She tore off the cellophane wrapping of the fifty Player’s, emptied them into the needlework-box, and, with prickling fingers, began to arrange them in neat rows.

  Tilly Parsons.

  She felt a slight shudder: the thing which is known as the sensation of someone walking over your grave. It might have been a real grave. Maybe it still would be. It had never once occurred to her to suspect Tilly. And, she thought with hot-and-cold satisfaction, it had never occurred to Bill Cartwright either. Even if he tried to get specimens of handwriting from everybody at Pineham, he would never even think of looking at Tilly’s.

  It was growing darker in the room. She must get out of here. She must go somewhere.

  ‘Hello, dearie,’ cried Tilly in the flesh, suddenly flinging the door open with a crash, and bursting into the room. ‘Did you have a good time in London?’

  4

  Tilly, bright and alert as usual, gave evidence of having had her bobbed hair permanently waved that afternoon. Her wrinkled face beamed guilelessly at Monica.

  ‘Just hopped upstairs for a minute,’ she said. ‘I thought I put the kettle on before I left, but blessed if I can remember whether I did or not. I’ve been –’ She stopped. ‘Here, honey, what’s the matter with you? You’re as white as a ghost.’

  ‘Go away,’ said Monica. ‘Don’t come near me.’

  She got up, knocking over her chair with a noise which sounded louder in her ears than it really was. Tilly’s voice went up a note.

  ‘What�
�s happened, honey? What’s wrong?’

  ‘You know what’s wrong.’

  ‘I swear I don’t, honey! Here, let me –’

  ‘Go away!’

  Monica, moving slowly, had backed across the room until her hands behind her touched the sill of the window. The hoarseness of Tilly’s voice had reached a pitch which in her ears sounded horrible. Tilly waddled forward. Her eye fell on the two sheets of paper across the typewriter, and she stopped.

  The silence went on unendurably.

  ‘So you’ve found out,’ said Tilly, keeping her head down. ‘I was afraid you would.’

  ‘You … wrote … those … letters.’

  ‘As God is my judge,’ said Tilly, suddenly lifting her head and looking Monica in the eyes. ‘As God is my judge, I never did.’

  ‘Don’t you come near me.’ said Monica, pretty steadily. ‘I’m not afraid of you. Only – why did you do it? I’ve never done anything to you. I liked you. Why did you do it?’

  Even now she was stunned by the fierce sincerity of Tilly’s manner. Tilly’s manner, in fact, had reached that pitch of high-flown and impossible melodrama which is often the surest sign of good faith. Uprearing her ample bosom, Tilly lifted her right hand as though she were taking an oath; the flabby flesh sagged in folds at her wrist.

  ‘As I hope to live and die, as I hope to answer to the Good Man in heaven, I never wrote those letters! I know it looks like my writing. Do I know it? What do you think I’ve been thinking ever since you started to get them? I’ve been going nuts. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t –’

  She put her hand to her throat.

  ‘Wondering if you recognized the writing. Wondering if you thought it was me. Not daring to ask you. I had to give one of ’em to Bill Cartwright; I just had to. I had to know what was going on, don’t you see that? If he’d asked me, I’d have told him; but I didn’t dare tell him straight out in case you’d think it was me. I didn’t do it, honey. I swear to God I didn’t do it. Look, honey –’

  Tilly, breathing like a horse, took a few steps forward. Monica moved away until she was touching the wall of the cloakroom and Tilly stopped. All emotion, either passion, or wheedling, seemed to collapse in her, leaving her spent and wrinkled like a toy balloon. Her voice became a dreary croak. Picking up the overturned chair, she set it right and flopped down on it. She wiped her eyes, blinked, and grew calm.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ she said. ‘If you won’t believe me, you won’t. Where do we go from here?’

  And she peered about the room, absently, during another silence.

  Against all reason, Monica felt a twinge of doubt.

  ‘But they’re your writing! Look at it. Do you deny that they’re your writing?’

  ‘I do, honey,’ returned Tilly. ‘Because they’re not.’

  ‘They even sound like you. I – I’ve been trying to think all along who the phrasing of them reminded me of; and it’s you.’

  ‘I expect they do, honey,’ said Tilly indifferently, continuing to blink and peer round the room as though the matter were of no interest to her. ‘I expect they were meant to.’

  ‘Meant to?’

  ‘That’s what I said, honey.’

  ‘But do you know anybody who could imitate your handwriting? Or would you want to?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Tilly, with a certain grimness. ‘I know one person. But that person … Sh-h!’

  Footsteps, light and precise as of a woman who walks well, could be heard coming down a distant staircase. The footsteps passed the mouth of the corridor, hesitated, and turned in. Someone, as though to exercise a fine and deep contralto voice, was humming an experimental bar or two of a song.

  ‘Ditch those papers!’ hissed Tilly, making a striking movement like a snake. Tilly was again all action. She swept up the manuscript-sheet and the letter, stuffed them into the drawer of Monica’s desk, and slammed the drawer shut as there was a light rap at the corridor door.

  ‘Hello,’ smiled Frances Fleur, putting her head in. In the gloom she seemed surprised and a trifle annoyed when she saw Tilly. ‘Do you mind if I come in, Monica? I have a very important message for you.’

  XI

  The Singular Contents of a Leather Box

  1

  ‘IT’s very dark in here,’ continued Miss Fleur. ‘Do you mind?’

  A light-switch clicked beside the door.

  Frances Fleur was one of those people who always bring excitement with them, because it was a sort of excitement merely to sit and look at her. She incited what young ladies in the ninepennies had been overheard to describe as a ‘goosey feeling’. And this was not personality: it was sheer good looks, animated by the expression of the eyes.

  The face haunted you. On the screen you could not look away from it. In private life, with colour to make it more alive, it was at times startling. Such was the effect when she turned on the light in Monica’s office, and blinked and smiled against it. Tilly Parsons suddenly resembled a rag doll after rain. Even Monica would have had nobody’s eye except Bill Cartwright’s.

  Monica was partly used to her by now. She catalogued the woman’s clothes: powder-blue; two-piece; silver fox at the sleeves. Summer-felt hat, of the same blue colour, shading the side of the face. Black suède shoes, black handbag, and gloves. Yet even Monica felt the disturbing wave of her presence.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve been in here,’ Frances Fleur smiled. ‘It’s a comfortable place to work in, isn’t it? May I sit down?’

  ‘Please do. Try the couch.’

  Miss Fleur moved across. She made the room look dingy; she stirred the air, and made it impossible to look anywhere else but at her.

  ‘I’ve got two messages for you,’ she told Monica. ‘The first is from Tom and Howard. They’re terribly sorry, but they simply couldn’t come to see you this afternoon. They say you must be cursing them, but they couldn’t help it.’ She looked at the ceiling. ‘They’ve been up in Tom’s office all afternoon, arguing, and I’ve just got away from them. What’s the matter, dear? Why are you laughing? What’s so funny?’

  ‘You mean they didn’t –?’

  ‘No, dear. They couldn’t. I say, don’t laugh like that; you make me nervous. They’ve finally come to a decision about Spies at Sea.’ The expressive eyes, never quite telling everything, moved round towards Tilly for the first time. ‘And that’s rather a bit of good news for you.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Tilly. ‘Why?’

  Tilly had been regarding her with a stiffness which indicated ill-concealed dislike.

  ‘Because you can go back to America now,’ said Miss Fleur. ‘I think they’ve decided they will stick to the original script after all. You don’t mind terribly, do you?’

  Tilly stared at her. There passed across her face an expression of real malignancy: a new expression: one which it was just as well that Monica did not notice.

  ‘Mind?’ Tilly said, from deep in her throat. ‘Me! Hell, no! Suit yourself. I’ve had my money: I should worry.’ Her colour went up. ‘If you want the goods, I can deliver ’em. If you don’t want the goods, then good-bye and good luck and good day to ye.’

  ‘I knew you’d understand.’ The long-lashed eyes, at which Monica could not stop looking, returned; but not before they had given Tilly a long, speculative glance. ‘And that’s good news,’ Miss Fleur went on, ‘because now we shall be finished with it in a few days. And then – if Tom Hackett keeps to his production schedule – I can play Eve D’Aubray in Desire. Won’t that be nice?’

  ‘Mind!’ growled Tilly under her breath.

  ‘I’m terribly keen about the part. Did you know, Miss Parsons, that Monica wrote it expressly for me?’

  ‘The name is Tilly,’ said Tilly. ‘For Pete’s sake don’t call me Miss Parsons. I hate it.’

  ‘Well, if you insist: Tilly. But did you know Monica wrote the part for me? A real femme fatale, and apparently I’m It.’

  ‘You mean you have It,’ snarled Tilly. ‘But
why parade it all over the place all the time? Why –’ She checked herself, swallowing, and drew the back of her hand shakily across her forehead. ‘Sorry. Forget it. I’ve got the jitters. What’s a femme fatale?’

  Miss Fleur’s tone was wry.

  ‘Something I’m afraid I shall never be,’ she smiled, with a look which made Monica writhe. It is all very well to write an imaginary biography of a person; but, when the original of that biography sits down to read it in cold print, the result is apt to prove embarrassing for the author.

  ‘Tell me, my dear,’ Miss Fleur went on, in a slightly different voice. ‘I’ve read it clear through, you know, since I met you. I know you’ll forgive my asking, but I really am curious. Was it all just imagination? You look terribly young, you know, and – other things. Tell me. Just between ourselves. Did you ever really …?’

  ‘Oh Lord, yes,’ said Monica. ‘Thousands of times,’ she added wildly.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Oh Lord, yes.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘At home, of course,’ said Monica.

  That the shattered photograph of Canon Stanton did not, at this moment, leap up out of the drawer of Monica’s desk may be ascribed rather to the inexorability of the law of gravity than to the damage done to abstract truth.

  But Monica was not herself. Much as she liked Miss Fleur, she wished her guest would go. Her mind was on anonymous letters to the exclusion of everything else. Yet, curiously enough, Frances Fleur seemed to be feeling much the same restlessness as herself. Miss Fleur’s well-shod foot had begun to tap on the floor. She kept glancing at her wrist-watch.

  ‘Have you, indeed?’ she said. ‘What a place it must be. It’s near Watford?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. East Roystead, Hertfordshire. It’s near Watford.’