Close at hand, you could see a faint pale edge of electric light behind the close-drawn blinds of windows and door.
'Hello!' he called. 'Hello there!’
He expected no reply, but in a sense he received one. Behind that closed door, footsteps on bare boards moved away: quick footsteps, tiptoe and stealthy, retreating towards the living-premises behind.
Dick took hold of the door-handle. Though this door never opened after six - except when Henry Garrett the postman came at nine for the evening mail-collection which Miss Feathers put ready for him in a canvas bag - still the door was unlocked now.
An image of Miss Feathers, who would talk of nothing but her gastritis and the enormities of her customers, rose in Dick's mind now. He flung the door open, and smelled burnt powder-smoke.
Inside the little dingy premises of the post office, a dusty electric bulb shone down on the wire-grilled postal counter along the right, and the drapery counter with its shelves along the left. Its floor-boards, worn smooth and black after so many years, reflected that light At the rear Dick saw an open door leading to the living-premises, from which he could hear the singing and knocking of a boiling tea-kettle.
But he did not look at that, first of all.
The inside of the letter-and-parcels box was under the window on the same side as the drapery counter. Its little wooden door stood wide open. You dropped letters through those slots facing the street, and they fell into the box on this side; but few of them remained in the box now.
The floor on that side, in fact, was scattered with trampled envelopes of all sizes, as though they had been blown wide by a gust of wind. A tightly rolled magazine in its wrapper still bumped along the uneven floor, its blue stamp turning over and over until it lodged against the counter opposite.
And behind the drapery counter, swaying on her feet, stood Miss Laura Feathers herself.
Her dark eyes, though they were glazing and could have seen little, nevertheless had an electric wildness. Incredibly ugly, incredibly dingy she looked, with the greyish hair drawn up in a knot from her ravaged face, and the shapeless dark dress. Shot through the body at close range, she kept the fingers of her right hand, bloodied fingers, pressed hard under her left breast. She must have had some dim comprehension of a newcomer. For with her left hand, which seemed to clutch a fragment of paper, she kept shaking and pointing with frantic vitality towards the door at the rear.
For a second more she kept gaspingly pointing and shaking that hand, trying to speak before she fell over in a heap behind the counter.
Then there was silence, except for the singing and knocking of the tea-kettle in the back room.
CHAPTER l8
IN his dreams, for long afterwards, Dick Markham remembered those eyes fixed on him. They had a pathos, a sick realization of her plight, an appeal which Miss Feathers had never exercised in life. For she was dead now.
Dick found her lying behind the counter, the eyes wide open. She lay on a drift of scattered envelopes, her left hand still pointing forward. But the fingers had relaxed a little before they tightened, suddenly, in the pinching grip of death. The piece of paper she had been holding, slightly bloodstained along the edges, lay beside her hand.
Dick picked it up mechanically, when Miss Feather's body jerked like a fish and then lay still. He could not have told why he picked it up. Yet, subconsciously, something had caught his eye.
The piece of paper was a narrow fragment of the top of an envelope, torn lengthwise and upwards, just missing the stamp. Inside it stuck an even smaller fragment of a sheet of notepaper which had been inside the missing envelope. Typewritten words, a few words which had been left behind of the original note, struck up at him. The torn strip said:
why be such fools? If you want to know how Lesley Grant did it
No more. And nothing on the opposite side. But Dick stared at the words as though they were enlarging before his eyes.
For they had been written on his own typewriter.
No mistaking that cranky 'y', which always gave him so much trouble, or the black 'w', which he could never get properly clear. Dick lived for and at and with typewriters;
he would have known his own Underwood anywhere. For seconds he stood looking at this nightmare fragment before something else made him jerk up his head.
Somewhere in the living-premises at the rear, stealthy footsteps again began to run.
He never knew until afterwards how near he came to getting a revolver-bullet through his own heart. For he acted mechanically, without thinking of consequences. Still tightly holding the shred of note and envelope, he vaulted over the counter and ran for the door at the rear.
Three straggling rooms, one behind the other in a straight line, ran out ahead of him. In the first, a sitting-room-kitchen of greasy wallpaper, the table was set for supper and the banging kettle on the hob sent up a cloud of steam. The room was empty. Beyond, another door led to a bedroom - and across this, as he plunged in, he saw an opposite door to the scullery sharply close.
He was chasing the murderer, no doubt of that. The bedroom was dark. Somebody, on the other side of the door in the scullery, was frantically fumbling to turn the key on that side; frantically fumbling to lock the door against him.
And the key wouldn't turn.
Dick, racing for that door, fell at full length over a clothes-horse of underwear set straight in his path. He came down with ajar that bit needles into the palms of his hands, and struck his wits as though with a blow across the brain. But he was up again like an india-rubber cat, kicking the clattering clothes-horse out of his way.
The scullery was empty too.
Smelling of stale water and soap-suds, it was not quite so dark as the bedroom. Its back door, glass-panelled, still quivered against the wall where somebody had flung it open after running out only a few seconds before.
Got away?
No! But...
Grey light outlined against black the oblongs of the scullery windows. Dick emerged from the back door into a sweet-scented dusk rustling with the leaves of chestnut trees, and realized with a start where he had come.
The length of this narrow post office building carried him over fifty feet back from the High Street. Beyond a waist-high stone wall which surrounded the grounds, he could see across from him the side and part of the back of Lesley Grant's house.
The running shadow of the murderer, a shadow blurred to shapelessness, streaked across the lawn. It melted into the outline of a tree, hesitated, and moved softly towards the back door of Lesley's house. No light showed from the kitchen there; no light illuminated a face. Dick was just able to see the edge of the back door open and close, soundlessly, as the figure melted inside.
Into Lesley's house. That meant...
Hold on!
Panting, Dick climbed over the low wall into the grounds. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, other figures swam towards him. For some seconds he had been conscious of a bumping, rattly sound, the noise of a lawn-mower upended and rolled through grass.
He could now identify the lawn-mower he had heard a while ago. It had been pushed by McIntyre, Lesley's gardener, whose tall gaunt figure now appeared near the back door. Glancing to the left, towards the front of the house, Dick saw the vast, the unmistakable figure of Dr Gideon Fell, in cape and shovel-hat, advancing along the path towards the front door.
Dr Fell and Hadley had been walking not far behind him. They must have heard that gunshot too.
But this was not what caused the rush of elation which flooded through Dick's nerves as his intelligence began to work again. He held up the torn shreds of notepaper and envelope in his hand. His mind suddenly fitted together a number of isolated facts. And he breathed for joy and relief at what he had to tell himself. The murder of Laura Feathers was the final, convincing proof of Lesley Grant's innocence.
He could demonstrate it
Yet it brought the shock of new dangers. The real murderer, bolting out at the rear of the post o
ffice, had unexpectedly been penned in on three sides. McIntyre was approaching from one direction, Dr Fell from another direction, and Dick from still a third. The murderer had taken refuge in Lesley's house. Since Lesley was there alone, with only Mrs Rackley to attend her ...
It was an unnerving thought. Dick ran hard across the lawn to the back door.
'Stand in front of this door!' he shouted to an astounded Mclntyre. 'Don't let anybody get out! Do you understand?'
'Yes, sir. But -'
He did not stop to inquire into McIntyre's astonishment Opening the back door, he entered a dark kitchen heavy with the smell of cooking, saw a line of light shining under the swing-door to the dining-room, and hurried through.
Lesley, in a light-green dinner-dress frilled at the shoulders, got up hastily from the other side of the table. The chandelier lights shone down on the polished mahogany of that table: on the round lace mats, on the china and cutlery for a meal which had not been served, on the silver candlesticks with tall white candles which had not been lighted.
Lesley herself, after the start she could not help giving, stood with her arms straight down at her sides. He saw the sleekness of the brown hair, the soft line of chin and neck, the brown eyes suddenly turned away.
'Your dinner's out there,' she said, and nodded towards the kitchen without looking at him. ' It's cold. I - I told Mrs Rackley to go. When you came to face it, couldn't you bear to eat with the daughter of Lily Jewell?'
Yet, even in the midst of the morbid thoughts which he guessed must have been torturing her, she could not help noticing his expression.
'Lesley,' he said, 'who came into this house just now?'
Her hand tightened on the back of a chair. She looked away for a second, as though to clear her head of angry and and half-tearful confusion, before turning back to him in perplexity.
' Into this house ? Nobody!'
'Through the back door. Not half a minute ago.'
'Nobody came in except you. I've been here all the time! I ought to know!'
'There's that breakfast-room,' said Dick. 'He, or she' - a fleeting glimpse of Cynthia Drew's face appeared to his imagination - 'or whoever it is, could have gone through there into the front hall without your knowing it.'
'Dick, what on earth is all this?'
He didn't want to alarm her, but it had to be told.
' Listen, my dear. Laura Feathers has been killed. Somebody got into the post office and shot her only a few minutes ago.' He saw Lesley's slim fingers tighten on the back of the chair; she swayed, her head thrown back under this final bedevilment. 'What's more, the murderer is the same person who killed Sam De Villa. And I'm afraid he's in the house now.'
The shrill pealing of the front door bell, whose buzzer was in this room, made them both jump like the whirr of a rattlesnake.
Lesley stared at him.
' It's all right!' Dick assured her. "That's Dr Fell. He was coming up the front path; I saw him. You say Mrs Rackley isn't here?'
'No. I sent her away because ... . '
'Then come along with me,' said Dick, taking firm hold of her wrist. 'There probably isn't any danger, but I don't want you out of my sight while I answer that door.'
A voice in his mind said: You're a liar, my lad. There's a very great deal of danger when a person who hates Lesley Grant as the devil hates holy-water is trapped and cornered with a loaded gun in that same girl's house. Every corner of a familiar house, every curtain and stair-landing, was fanged and poisoned with danger. Dick held even more tightly to Lesley's wrist, despite her struggles to get away.
’I’d really rather you didn't touch me,' Lesley said breathlessly. 'When you and Cynthia -' 'Don't mention Cynthia!' 'Why not?'
Half dragging her into the front hall, Dick opened the door; and saw, as he had hoped, the reassuring immensity of Dr Fell outside.
'Laura Feathers -' Dick began.
' I know,' said Dr Fell. His waistcoat rose and fell wheezily; his voice was subdued. 'We heard the shot and saw you run in. Hadley's there now. May I ask, sir, just what devil's wasp-nest you've overturned now?'
'That,' said Dick, 'is exactly what you can call it. In the first place, I can prove Lesley had no hand in any funny business at all. In the second place, I don't have to prove it, because if you give a shout for whatever policemen you've got at hand, we can nail the murderer in this house.'
In three sentences he outlined the story. Its effect on Dr Fell was rather curious. The Gargantuan doctor stood motionless on the doorstep, his shovel-hat still on his head and his hands folded over his cane, breathing noisily. He kept his eyes fixed on the two tiny scraps of paper Dick held out to him.
This phlegmatic attitude, when Dick Markham half expected somebody to fire a bullet from the direction of the stairs, drove Dick into a frenzy.
'Don't you understand, sir?' he repeated, with a sort of wild patience. 'In the house!'
'Oh, ah,' said Dr Fell. His eyes moved over the hall behind. 'In the house. Can he get out the back way?'
'I hope not. Anyway, Joe McIntyre the gardener is there.'
'And he can't get out the front way,' said Dr Fell, moving his bulk to peer round behind him, 'because Bert Miller is there, and a man who's just come down from the Criminal Records Department at Scotland. Harrumph, yes. Excuse me for just one moment.'
He lumbered off into the gloom, where they saw him conferring with two shadows in the path. One of these shadows slipped away towards the back of the house; the other remained where it was; and Dr Fell returned.
'Look here, sir!' protested Dick. 'Aren't we going to search the place?'
'At the moment,' answered Dr Fell, 'no. With your permission, I should much prefer to come in and talk for a little.'
'Then for God's sake let me get Lesley away from here while ...'
' It would be better, I assure you, if Miss Grant remained.' 'Even with the murderer in the house?' 'Even,' replied Dr Fell gravely, 'with the murderer in the house.'
And he stepped into the hall, sweeping off his shovel-hat and thrusting his cane under his arm.
The brightly lighted dining-room attracted his attention. Ponderously gesturing Lesley and Dick to precede him, he followed them into the dining-room. He blinked round him with abstracted interest. He murmured some excuse about the heat. Rather clumsily emphasizing this excuse - it was warm in the room - Dr Fell threw open the thick curtains of the opened windows.
Under these two front windows stood a heavy Florentine oak chest. Dr Fell sat down on it, again propping his hands over his cane.
'Sir,' he began, 'those two shreds of paper, as you very properly remark, must go to Hadley. But I gather from your recital you believe you have discovered the meaning of what happened at the post office? Of that murder, in short?'
'Yes. I think I have.'
' Very well,' said Dr Fell.' Suppose you tell me what it is ?'
' Hang it, Doctor! At a time like this ...!'
' Yes, by thunder!' said Dr Fell. 'At a time like this I'
Lesley, though plainly she understood not one word of this, was trembling. Dick put his arm round her shoulders. The whole house seemed full of unaccountable creaks and cracks, as though it were poised; and the metronome-clock ticked in the hall.
'Just as you like,' said Dick.' When I met Superintendent Hadley at Ashe Hall this morning, that wasn't the first time I'd seen him.'
'Aha! Well?'
'The first time I saw him, I was standing at the window of Lesley's bedroom upstairs,' Dick pointed to the ceiling, 'and I saw him cross the road towards the post office.'
'Go on,'said Dr Fell.
'Then,' continued Dick, 'we had that conference in Lord Ashe's study at the Hall. You explained how this whole murder-scheme was an attempt to frame Lesley for the job-'
Dr Fell intervened.
'One moment,' he said. 'What I did, if you recall, was to challenge anyone to say what else it could be. But continue.'
'You said the real murderer had prov
ided us a problem. Now he'd got to provide a solution, a solution for the locked room, or the police couldn't touch Lesley. You suggested there would be a "communication".'
‘I did.'
'When you told us that,' Dick went on, 'Superintendent Hadley looked up all of a sudden and said, "Was that why you asked me, a while ago, to -?" And you shut up very quickly. You suggested it might be a telephone call.
'But Hadley never for a second believed in that "telephone-call". He mentioned it later, at the dead man's cottage. He pointed out it would be too risky, and added "But your other idea, I admit -" Whereupon you cut him off again. Not long afterwards, up cropped still another reference to your other scheme, and this time in flat-out connexion with the post office.
'I'm a' cloth-headed goop,' Dick concluded bitterly, ' for not guessing it long ago. Of course it's the old poison-pen trick.'
Lesley peered up at him in bewilderment.
'Poison-pen trick?' she repeated.
'Yes. If the real murderer wanted to get in touch with the police, then the obvious and safest anonymous way would be to write. And there's no stamp-machine at the post office, if you remember?'
'Stop a bit!' cried Lesley. 'I think I do begin to...'
'Anybody who wants stamps must buy 'em from Laura over the counter. Dr Fell,' said Dick,' believed this morning that one person, or maybe one of a small group of persons, would drop a line to explain how you committed the murder.'
'You mean-?'
'So he asked Hadley to do what the police often do when there's a plague of poison-pen letters. With the co-operation of whoever's in charge of the post office, every stamp sold to a suspected person or persons has a private mark on it. Then, when the anonymous letter arrives, the police can infallibly prove who wrote it.
'Would Laura Feathers have enjoyed helping in a trick like that? She'd have cackled and loved it! Dr Fell had a shot at the same trick for trapping this murderer. And it very nearly worked.
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