The Girl in the Cellar (The Miss Silver Mysteries Book 32)

by Patricia Wentworth

  When she reached it, it was like coming home. The bed was sideways to the window. Someone had put a candle on the chest of drawers. She walked to the bed and laid herself down on it. She would have liked the window open, but it was too much trouble to bother about that. She pulled up the eiderdown until it covered her and turned on the pillow and went to sleep. The last thing she knew was the change from light to darkness. There was the click of a turning key. She slept.

  FORTY-FOUR

  JIM FANCOURT HUNG up, dressed, and went out. The first thing he did was to go round to where Anne had been. Lizabet had to face him. She didn’t want to, but she had to do it. For the first time in her life she came up against the consequences of her own actions and saw them for what they were. She cried, and was told that it was no use crying – it wouldn’t help her, and it wouldn’t help Anne. And there was no help in Janet. She couldn’t get away. She had to answer, and bit by bit the picture of what had really happened in the night came into view. And Janet stood by. She kept her there, and she made her answer. Lizabet would never have believed that she could be so cruel.

  And then, before she could even burst into tears, there was Jim Fancourt asking more questions, and more, and more.

  By the time they had got everything out of her and Jim had gone she was fit for nothing but to lie on her bed and cry. And Janet left her to do just that. She went out and left her all alone.

  Jim Fancourt went to New Scotland Yard. He had to wait, and the time that ticked away was like endless ages. Where was she? Why had they taken her? What were they doing to her? Where was she? Interminably, over and over, the words said themselves. There was no end to them. They got him nowhere. All they did was to make it clear as daylight that if he lost Anne he lost everything in the world worth having.

  He did not know how long he had to wait, but when the fresh-faced young policeman came in and said that Inspector Abbott would see him now it seemed to him as if a lifetime had gone by.

  The young policeman preceded him, opened the door, announced him by name, and he came into the same room that he had been in before, with Frank Abbott looking up and giving him a friendly greeting. He said, ‘She’s gone—’ and saw Frank’s face change.

  ‘What!’

  ‘She’s gone – they’ve got her.’

  ‘My dear chap—’

  ‘Everyone said don’t be in a hurry, don’t rush her. And what’s the result? She’s gone.’

  ‘Anne!’

  ‘Yes, Anne.’

  ‘Sit down and tell me about it.’

  ‘I can’t sit. I’ll tell you about it – it’s soon told. She’s gone – that’s all.’

  In the end he produced a fairly coherent version of Lizabet’s story.

  ‘She doesn’t know what sort of car it was, and her description of the man would fit almost anyone.’

  Frank said tentatively, ‘Look here, don’t be angry— It is possible that she recognized these people and went with them because she knew them.’

  ‘No, it’s not possible! That girl admitted as much. She said the fellow put his arm round her. And there was something about a cloth on her face. She was chloroformed and carried off – I’ve no doubt about that. She wouldn’t have gone of her own free will. I tell you she wouldn’t!’

  ‘It doesn’t seem very likely. You don’t think her memory came back suddenly when she saw someone she knew – someone out of her past life?’

  ‘No, I don’t. There would have been no need to chloroform her in that case. Once we got that girl Lizabet to speak, there was no doubt about it – she was chloroformed and she was carried off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine. Either it’s money, or she knows too much – or they think she does. They must know that she saw the murdered girl. If they’re not sure what she remembered, what perhaps she saw – if they don’t know what she knows – don’t you see she’s in the most frightful danger?’

  Frank nodded.

  ‘I took up the question of who had been to see that house with the agents. We haven’t been to sleep over the matter, you know. There were two orders to view – one on the twelfth, and the other on the thirteenth. The one on the thirteenth looks like the right one. It was given to a Mr Mailing – an old man with a beard, very chatty. He said he wanted to take in his grandchildren for the holidays, and he thought he wanted a furnished house, but what did they think? The people at the house-agents put him down as much talk and no performance. The beard could have been a disguise. They said he kept the key overnight.’

  ‘Why did they let him go round alone? That’s not usual, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. I asked them the same thing, and they said he was such a nice gentleman … Yes, yes, I know – it’s a clear case of do first and think afterwards. There are people like that, you know. What they suggest seems all right at the time. It’s only afterwards that it strikes you as peculiar. And Mr Marsh who runs the place was away sick. The second string, Mr Dowding, is a nice old boy – not accustomed to taking responsibility, I should say. The house had hung on their hands. It’s been left to two sisters who are very particular, and Mr Marsh is tired of sending people to see it. Mr Dowding was thrilled at the chance of letting it while his partner was away.’ Frank shrugged his shoulders.

  Jim said impatiently, ‘Yes, I know. I saw him.’ He paused, and came out with, ‘What do we do now?’

  FORTY-FIVE

  ANNE WOKE UP. It was early morning – very early. For a moment she did not know where she was, and then it came back to her. First of all, where she was. It was all accustomed and familiar. She was Anne Forest, and she had lived here since she was a little girl. She had lived here with Aunt Letty – Aunt Letty Forest.

  She remembered.

  She remembered Aunt Letty bringing her to the house for the first time. It was a very dim memory that came and went. There was a big black dog. She could see his curled shining coat, but she couldn’t remember his name. They played together on a grass lawn behind the house, and Aunt Letty came and called her in to tea. She remembered the currant buns, how good they tasted. After that there was a long stretch when she didn’t remember anything at all, or only little bits. Aunt Letty was there all the time. Sometimes there were battles between them. One she remembered very distinctly. It was a hot, bright day in summer. It was hot and bright, but there must have been rain, because all along one side of the road there were little pools and puddles. And as she walked Anne trod in the puddles and splashed. It was lovely, but Aunt Letty didn’t think so. Aunt Letty said, ‘Stop at once, you naughty child!’ How funny to remember a thing like that after all these years. Aunt Letty was gone – three years ago. It was three years since Anne had stood at the door and waited for the cab to come and take her away – three years since Aunt Letty’s funeral – three years since she was twenty-one. Dear Aunt Letty – dear, dear Aunt Letty. The loss of her came as fresh as if she had died yesterday instead of three years ago.

  The tears came fresh to her eyelids as she thought of that last day. She had gone out, and when she was half-way to the village she found that she had left her purse and she turned back. Then, when she was close among the bushes in the front of the house, she had heard the sound. She had heard it, but she didn’t know what it was. There was a crash and a fall. She had to describe them over and over again, and she couldn’t get nearer than that. But when she came round the house, there was Aunt Letty fallen down by the back door with a terrible wound in her head. She wasn’t quite dead, but she died before the doctor came, and she died without recovering consciousness.

  Anne lay there and remembered. There was no clue – nothing at all. Someone had killed Aunt Letty. Someone had struck her a smashing blow and made off through the woods. There was nothing to say who it was.

  The house was left to Anne. Nobody wanted to take it, because of the murder. Everyone said that Anne couldn’t stay there. She didn’t want to stay there. She wanted to go away as far as poss
ible and never see the place again. At least she thought that that was what she wanted. She went away.

  She went right away, round the world with her friend Mavis Enderby. It was curious that all the time of being away seemed so dim. They had gone round the world and turned to come home through America. Try as she would, she couldn’t remember all that as she remembered the little bits and pieces of her childhood. And then Mavis had fallen in love with a chance-met stranger and had married him – just like that. And Anne had said she couldn’t think how anyone could do such a thing, but it was all right for Mavis if she wanted to. She didn’t know how she could, but it was her life, and she had nothing against Bill, who was nice but no different from hundreds of other men whom they had met.

  What makes you fall in love with one and not with another? What had made her fall in love with Jim and he with her? They had both met dozens of other people. There was everything to stop them, and yet they had both gone down drowning deep.

  She sat up and looked around the room. It was her own room. In the early morning light it had a shabby, familiar look. She got out of bed and went to the window. The trees had grown. They had not been cut or pruned, and they crowded upon one another. Her room looked to the back of the house. There used to be a gap between the two end cherry trees, and you could see right down the hill to Swan Eaton. Now there was no gap. The trees closed it in. You couldn’t see the village, or any habitation.

  For the first time since she had wakened Anne began to feel afraid. She didn’t know what she was afraid of, but fear came silting over her and she drew back from the window as if the fear were outside in the garden among the trees.

  But that was nonsense. Nonsense or not, she went right back from the window until she touched the bed and sat down on it, shaking a little. She was remembering – that was why she was afraid. She had landed from the States and gone to London. She hadn’t written to say she was coming. That is to say, she hadn’t given any exact date. She had been away for nearly three years, and she had waited to see Mavis married, and then she had come. There wasn’t anyone very near – some cousins whom she had never seen much of. She remembered arriving in London on a dark rainy evening. She remembered going to an hotel. And she couldn’t remember anything more than that. It seemed very far away and vague, but she did remember getting to the hotel in the evening and being very tired. And after that nothing – nothing at all until she was standing half-way down those cellar steps and knowing that there was a girl’s dead body at their foot. She didn’t strain to remember. Perhaps it would come back. It was no good straining. There was a gap in her mind. She couldn’t fill it up by trying, but at least she knew who she was now.

  There was a clock on the mantelpiece. She looked up for it as if she expected it to be there. Someone must have wound it. It said half-past six. She tried the door and found it locked. Her clothes were here, and there was water in the jug on the washstand. She washed, dressed, and felt more ready to face things.

  There were the two men here – her cousin Ross Cranston and the other man whose name she didn’t know. She wasn’t really afraid of Ross. He had come and gone, always rather unsatisfactory and a trouble to Aunt Letty, but she had never thought of him as someone to be afraid of. It was the other man who made her feel as if a cold finger touched her spine. She didn’t know his name. She only knew that he was evil, and that she stood in his way. What happens to you when you stand in the way of an evil person?

  She made herself look at the answer to that.

  FORTY-SIX

  ANNE WENT ON remembering. It was here a little and there a little. Then, suddenly, something that made sense of a lot of things. She sat in her bedroom, and in her mind she went round the house. Every time she did this she remembered something fresh. You couldn’t push your memories, they just came. And they came in the funniest way. It was when she was going up the attic stair in her mind that she remembered why she had gone to the London hotel, and it’s name, the Hood.

  Aunt Letty had always stayed there. It was the sort of hotel where ladies like Aunt Letty stay – very dignified, rather expensive, thoroughly respectable. It had not the faintest connection with the attics, and why she should remember it when she was thinking about going up the attic stair in this house she couldn’t imagine.

  She put the hotel away and went on picking her way round the house. She had been going up the attic stair – she would go on. The stair was very steep. She could remember Aunt Letty telling her to be careful as she came and went. She even remembered what she had said … No, that wasn’t Aunt Letty – that was Grammy. How curious to have no consciousness at all of someone, and then to have her back as if she had never been away. Dear, dear Grammy, who was the cook until the second year of the war, when she left to take charge of her sister’s children when her sister had been killed by a bomb. Grammy had always said, ‘Now you mind your feet, my dear. Don’t you look at them and don’t you hurry them, and you won’t fall.’

  The attic was large and dark. Anne always thought it was like a hospital, because there were broken things everywhere – a screen with a hole in the panel, a chair with a broken leg, a picture with a broken frame. She remembered so many broken things. How strange that she could remember these things which had never mattered very much – remember them quite accurately and distinctly as she sat on the side of her bed in a locked room on the floor below – things that she hadn’t seen or thought of for three years. And yet she couldn’t remember what had happened so short a time ago.

  The attic – it was curious how she came back to it. Perhaps it was an association of ideas. She would have to think that out. Everything in the attic was mixed up, nothing was in order. That was how her mind was – old things, new things. Not so many of those. Things that had had their value and lost it, things that had never had any value at all. In her mind’s eye she stood in the doorway of the attic and looked into its dimly lighted depths. There seemed to be no end to the things that were in it, as there was no end to the things that were in her mind – things half forgotten, things half remembered, things that showed vaguely and were half glimpsed and then wholly lost again. Time went by.

  The house began to stir. Someone came along the passage. The key turned in the lock. Anne sat quite still. The handle turned, and the door opened a very little way. Ross’s voice said her name.

  ‘Anne—’

  She said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are you? Do you feel like getting up?’

  She said, ‘Yes,’ again.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stayed for a minute, twisting the handle, not opening the door any more, and then shutting it carefully so as not to make any noise. He went downstairs then, moving very quietly and carefully.

  Anne found herself laughing. That was Ross all over, to get himself into an indefensible position and not have the courage to brazen it out. She remembered that she had always despised him, and that cheered her. He had not locked the door when he had gone, so she was no longer a prisoner. She went to the bathroom, emptied the water she had washed in, made her bed. She began to wonder whether she was alone with Ross – whether the other man was gone. She did not count on it, but she wondered.

  When she had finished the things she had to do she went to the dressing-table and looked at herself in the glass. There were dark marks under her eyes that did not please her. She thought she looked as if she had been ill. She rubbed her cheeks, and then wished that she hadn’t. It was all right for her to look pale. Besides, it didn’t matter how she looked.

  She went downstairs. Someone was frying bacon and sausages. She came into the kitchen and saw the other man. As always, the sight of him did things to her courage. She felt the same horrid inward shaking that had come on her in the garden at Chantreys when she had looked up and seen him leaning against the gate. But this time she was at some pains to hide her fear. She was horribly afraid, but she mustn’t let him see it.

  ‘Ah, you’ve wake
d,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ross said you’d be down. We brought the bacon with us. No sense in making talk in the village.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  He burst out laughing.

  ‘Very cool and calm, aren’t you! Going to be a sensible girl?’

  Anne made herself look at him. She kept her eyes level and calm on his.

  ‘It depends on what you mean by sensible.’

  He gave her an insolent look.

  ‘Do what you’re told. Make yourself useful. Speak when you’re spoken to. Hold your tongue when you’re bid.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  He set down his pan of sausages a little to one side of the fire and came towards her. Anne went back as far as she could go. The wall stopped her, and she stood. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked down on her.

  ‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ he said. ‘Is that quite clear? Is it? Is it?’ His voice didn’t get any louder, it softened. That softening of a harsh voice was the most horrible thing that Anne had ever heard.

  A dizziness came over her. She tried to keep her head up and her eyes steady. His eyes were like a hawk’s, dominant, ferocious. She couldn’t go any farther back. And then there was a footstep outside, and she called out. He said on a low growling note, ‘You watch your step,’ and turned round and went back to the fire.

  When Ross came in she was so glad to see him that it was all she could do not to show it. It was all she could do, but she did it. To let them know how terribly afraid she was would be to give away her last scrap of protection. She moved to a chair and sat down.