In her thoughts Kay was back again in the bicycle shed, seeing her sister standing there, white, defiant, the pajamas limp in her hand, seeing the sudden flicker of her eyes which had given away for a moment some of the heartbreak and horror inside her. Maud until the bitter, bitter end had fought her children’s battles against all corners.
Her children! Yes, that meant Gilbert too. Kay felt a strange lassitude. She said: “So it’s all over, Tim.”
His hand moved to the breast pocket of the tweed jacket—Terry’s jacket. “As soon as Elaine broke down, he was ready to tell me everything. I told you he signed a written confession. I’m going to give it to the Major, going to try to make it as easy as possible.”
His face, dark and steady, had lost all traces of uncertainty now that he had told her. With him there, so close to her, the barrier against emotion which Kay had spent three years building up seemed to dissolve. Her strange fear of him, of what he could do to her, was no longer relevant.
She turned away from him, moving aimlessly to the window. She had never been at the slave cottage window before. It was a strange sensation, like being on the prow of a ship, poised perilously over the water. In front of her, the bay still gleamed with a magical beauty which now seemed—pitiless. She saw the island, a soft, dark silhouette; she saw the moonlight in a wide shining path across the water like a road in a dream. A lonely, empty road leading beyond the end of the world.
Empty… She stiffened. What was that small, dark thing bobbing there in the path of the moonlight?
“Look, Tim,” she called. And then, as certainty came: “Quick. Come and look. Someone’s out there in the bay—swimming.”
He was at her side in an instant. But she was scarcely conscious of him. That dark bobbing head put the clock horribly back. Just about this time yesterday someone had been swimming out there in the moonlight, swimming toward the island with murder in his heart. Just about this time yesterday, Gilbert…
And now there was a swimmer too, heading not for the island, but straight out to sea.
“Tim,” she cried. “It’s Gilbert. It must be Gilbert. He’s… Quick!”
She was running out of the cottage then. Tim was behind her. She was running over the smooth, moon-drenched lawn to the place where the grass slid imperceptibly down to the swimming beach.
She reached the rim of the coral sand. Tim caught up with her. He touched her arm and pointed to the oleanders. There in the shadow of the bushes, just where it must have been yesterday, was Gilbert’s empty wheel chair.
Desperately Kay ran down onto the beach, staring out across the bay. Straight in the path of the moon, beyond the edge of the island, she could see the bobbing head.
“Tim, we’ve got to go after him,” she said breathlessly. “He’s—he’s going to drown himself. We’ve got to stop him. We’ve…”
She turned then. With a little gasp she saw that there was a third person on the beach, a third person moving toward them out of the shadow of the tamarisks.
Maud…!
While Kay stood staring, her sister came to her. In the moonlight her face had some of the indomitable marble serenity of a Greek statue.
“Dear Kay,” she said quietly. “Don’t stop him. This is so much easier, so much kinder than waiting for Major Clifford.”
The roof of Kay’s mouth was dry as parchment. She thought of Maud’s standing there under the tamarisks, watching the husband she loved swimming out to sea on a one-way journey.
It was too much for her. A sob rose in her throat.
“Maud…!”
And, against all reason, Maud was comforting her. Putting her arm around her, stroking her hair.
“You mustn’t worry for me, Kay. Gilbert did what he thought he had to do. It isn’t for us to judge what was right or wrong for him. And now this is the only way for it to end.” She added softly: “He’d never have been really happy—a cripple in a wheel chair for the rest of his life.”
Kay drew herself away. Maud was gazing out across the sound. So was Tim. Kay, her eyes blurred, looked too.
The path of the moonlight was empty again. There was nothing now to break its smoothness.
Maud’s voice sounded in the silence, low and steady. “We must try to think of the children, Kay. What Gilbert did was criminal, terrible. But at least he saved the children. They can start again now. Elaine and Don. Terry and Simon.”
The words faded. For a second Maud’s fingers touched Kay’s arm. Then noiselessly she moved away from them over the coral sand, through the tamarisks—out of sight.
Kay and Tim were alone. Slowly she turned to him. In the moonlight his face was indistinct but hurtingly real.
“Maud’s right, Kay,” he said. “It is better this way.”
The visual image of him was so intense that she had to make an effort to understand what he had said.
Then shakily she murmured: “Yes, Tim.”
For a moment the bay, the moonlight, the soft night air, seemed to have no actuality, like things of the imagination. Then she felt Tim’s arms around her, felt the warmth of him, and his lips, sure and urgent, on hers.
“It is real, you see,” he whispered. “It isn’t a mirage.”
And, as she let him hold her, let his kisses comfort her, there slipped, poignantly, into her mind the words of the song Terry had made for her:
Return to Bermuda,
Return to the scene,
Bring love and bring happiness
Where heartbreak has been.
FIN
About Q. Patrick
Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (19 March 1912 – 26 July 1987), Richard Wilson Webb (August 1901 – December 1966), Martha Mott Kelley (30 April 1906 – 2005) and Mary Louise White Aswell (3 June 1902 – 24 December 1984) wrote detective fiction. In some foreign countries their books have been published under the variant Quentin Patrick. Most of the stories were written by Webb and Wheeler in collaboration, or by Wheeler alone. Their most famous creation is the amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
In 1931 Richard Wilson Webb (born in 1901 in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, an Englishman working for a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia) and Martha Mott Kelley collaborated on the detective novel Cottage Sinister. Kelley was known as Patsy (Patsy Kelly was a well-known character actress of that era) and Webb as Rick, so they created the pseudonym Q. Patrick by combining their nicknames—adding the Q "because it was unusual".
Webb's and Kelley's literary partnership ended with Kelley's marriage to Stephen Wilson. Webb continued to write under the Q. Patrick name, while looking for a new writing partner. Although he wrote two novels with the journalist and Harper's Bazaar editor Mary Louise Aswell, he would find his permanent collaborator in Hugh Wheeler, a Londoner who had moved to the US in 1934.
Wheeler's and Webb's first collaboration was published in 1936. That same year, they introduced two new pseudonyms: Murder Gone to Earth, the first novel featuring Dr. Westlake, was credited to Jonathan Stagge, a name they would continue to use for the rest of the Westlake series. A Puzzle for Fools introduced Peter Duluth and was signed Patrick Quentin. This would become their primary and most famous pen name, even though they also continued to use Q. Patrick until the end of their collaboration (particularly for Inspector Trant stories).
In the late 1940s, Webb's contributions gradually decreased due to health problems. From the 1950s and on, Wheeler continued writing as Patrick Quentin on his own, and also had one book published under his own name. In the 1960s and '70s, Wheeler achieved success as a playwright and librettist, and his output as Quentin Patrick slowed and then ceased altogether after 1965. However, Wheeler did write the book for the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd about a fictional London mass murderer, showing he had not altogether abandoned the genre.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
As Patrick Quen
tin
A Puzzle For Fools (1936)
Puzzle For Players (1938)
Puzzle For Puppets (1944)
Puzzle For Wantons (1945) aka Slay the Loose Ladies
Puzzle For Fiends (1946) aka Love Is a Deadly Weapon
Puzzle For Pilgrims (1947) aka The Fate of the Immodest Blonde
Run To Death (1948)
The Follower (1950)
Black Widow (1952) aka Fatal Woman
My Son, the Murderer (1954) aka the Wife of Ronald Sheldon
The Man With Two Wives (1955)
The Man in the Net (1956)
Suspicious Circumstances (1957)
Shadow of Guilt (1959)
The Green-Eyed Monster (1960)
The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow (1961), short stories
Family Skeletons (1965)
As Q. Patrick
Cottage Sinister (1931)
Murder at the Women's City Club (1932) aka Death in the Dovecote
S.S. Murder (1933)
Murder at the 'Varsity (1933) aka Murder at Cambridge
The Grindle Nightmare (1935) aka Darker Grows the Valley
Death Goes To School (1936)
Death For Dear Clara (1937)
The File on Fenton and Farr (1938)
The File on Claudia Cragge (1938)
Death and the Maiden (1939)
Return To the Scene (1941) aka Death in Bermuda
Danger Next Door (1952)
As Jonathan Stagge
The Dogs Do Bark (1936) aka Murder Gone To Earth
Murder by Prescription (1938) aka Murder or Mercy?
The Stars Spell Death (1939) aka Murder in the Stars
Turn of the Table (1940) aka Funeral For Five
The Yellow Taxi (1942) aka Call a Hearse
The Scarlet Circle (1943) aka Light From a Lantern
Death, My Darling Daughters (1945) aka Death and the Dear Girls
Death's Old Sweet Song (1946)
The Three Fears (1949)
As Hugh Wheeler
The Crippled Muse (1951)
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
About Q. Patrick
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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