Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  The bizarre thought crossed my mind that if the sleeping tablets hadn’t worked she’d have been in a bit of a spot, having destroyed her passport and her bank book and everything else. If by some chance she had been discovered before the drugs that she had taken had proved fatal, if she had been rushed in to a hospital and her life had been saved, she would have plumped straight from the sublime to the ridiculous and she might have had a lot of bureaucratic difficulties in getting hold of her money and in getting another passport. I smiled cynically and checked the smile, for after all the girl had been in deep and secret trouble and it was no laughing matter. But how certain she had been of death!

  How could she have been certain of her death? There are ways of committing suicide that really are certain, but taking sleeping tablets isn’t one of them. When you take sleeping tablets you go to sleep, and death, if it occurs, occurs several hours later. Even then, only a doctor experienced in the particular drug and in its effect upon a wide variety of patients could say with certainty that the dose she took would really prove lethal at all, or would prove lethal before she was found in the morning. Nothing I had heard indicated that this girl had any close or intimate knowledge of medical practice; she might conceivably have been a nurse at one time, but if so she had never betrayed the fact to my mother, who was an invalid.

  Everything that I had heard indicated that this girl was an educated, intelligent, and rational person. How could she possibly have been so sure of death as to get rid of everything by burning in the furnace? Surely it must have crossed her mind that suicide in the way that she proposed, though easy and pleasant, was by no means certain. She must have had some special knowledge of the drug, or she would not have destroyed her things.

  The whiskey may have been responsible though I had not had very much, because the sentence came in to my mind inverted. She would not have destroyed her things unless she had some special knowledge of the drug. She would have hidden them.

  She would have hidden them, so that she could regain them if, in fact, she survived the sleeping tablets. I had assumed after talking to Annie that she had burned everything in the central heating furnace, but there was not a scrap of evidence that she had done anything of the sort. With Annie in my mind, the question of the suitcases came forward again. Annie had been vaguely puzzled that there were only two suitcases in her room. Perhaps, in fact, there had been a third. Perhaps she had packed into that third suitcase all that she valued of her personal possessions and deposited it somewhere where she could get it if she did survive — in the baggage room of a railway station, for example.

  That wouldn’t work, because at Coombargana it would be impossible for her to get a suitcase off the place in privacy. No bus or other public transport comes to Coombargana or within five miles of us. She would have had to take it in to town in one of our cars or trucks. She could not possibly have taken a suitcase out of the house without someone noticing and commenting upon it, and no one had suggested anything of the sort. If she had hidden her belongings in a suitcase it would probably still be in Coombargana House; she would have had difficulty even in getting it down the stairs and out into the grounds without Annie noticing. It was at least a possibility that all the evidence that we were looking for was in the house with us.

  I poured myself another drink, a small one, and sat down in my father’s chair beside the dying fire. I never believe in dashing at things, and this needed thinking about. Suppose the girl had wanted to hide a suitcase in the house, where would she put it? It had to be where nobody would think of looking, somewhere accessible to her, where nobody would see her as she went to hide it.

  That seemed to mean the whole of the top floor. When Annie was in the kitchen or away the whole top floor of the house was hers to do what she liked with, for my parents seldom went up there now. Her case could be in any of the cupboards or closets, in any of the bedrooms. Downstairs would be far more difficult with Annie and my parents about. It would be difficult for her to take it out to one of the outbuildings, for the gardeners were frequently around or else the station hands; she could not count on being unobserved. But upstairs, on the bedroom floor of Coombargana House, she could definitely count on being unobserved at almost any time of day.

  If one were to take a look through the top floor of the house, where would one start? Where would she be most likely to hide a suitcase if she wanted to do so? There were the two empty servants’ bedrooms opposite her room and Annie’s; those, I knew, were used as lumber rooms or boxrooms now. A suitcase in amongst a pile of our own ancient, disused cases would lie there for years covered in dust, till in the future someone clearing out the room to send the contents to some jumble sale might find this one and puzzle over what was in it, when the very name of Jessie Proctor had been long forgotten.

  The more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that her belongings might be just across the corridor from her room. It was the rational and reasonable place for them to be.

  I left the drawing room and made my way upstairs through the silent house. I looked in at my own room and put another log upon the fire, hesitated, and fetched a small electric torch from the dressing table; I never travel without one of those. Then I went out into the corridor and passed through the swing door into the servants’ quarters, paused for a moment opposite the dead girl’s room to make quite sure that I was right, and opened the door on the opposite side of the corridor. My torch showed me the light switch, and I turned it on.

  It was a bedroom, a room with two beds, furnished sparsely as a servant’s room. This must be where they slept the married couple, when they had one. Except for the furniture it was completely empty; there were mattresses but no bedclothes on the beds. I opened the wardrobe door and all the drawers in turn and looked round for a cupboard, which wasn’t there. There was nothing in that room, at any rate.

  There was another bedroom, the one opposite Annie’s room. I went along the corridor and opened the door of that one. This was the room I remembered, the one used as a boxroom. There were beds dismantled and stacked by the wall, trunks, suitcases, garden furniture, deck and steamer chairs, beach umbrellas, curtain poles of an antique design, an old commode, spears, boomerangs, and woomeras, and all the junk that a country house accumulates throughout the years. I stood in the doorway looking at all this stuff, wondering where to begin my search.

  There was movement in the room behind me, Annie’s room, and a light switched on and showed under the door. I stood cursing and embarrassed in the door of the boxroom, till Annie came out of her room, dressed in a faded blue dressing gown, with wisps of thin grey hair hanging to her shoulders. “It’s all right, Annie,” I said a little testily. “I was just taking a look in here.”

  She said, “Oh — I’m sorry, Mr. Alan. I heard a noise and wondered what it was.” She made a movement to withdraw into her room, and then she paused and said, “Were you looking for anything in particular?”

  I hesitated. “It just crossed my mind that the girl might have had another suitcase, and that it might be in here.”

  “I do not think so, Mr. Alan,” she replied. “I looked in there this afternoon.”

  I stared at her; we had evidently been thinking along the same lines. “You did?”

  “Aye,” she said. “After the police went away it came into my mind she could have packed some of her things away and put them in this room. I had a good turn-out in here this afternoon.”

  “You didn’t find anything?”

  She shook her head.

  I glanced around the piles of junk. “Not amongst those suitcases?”

  She shook her head. “I opened every one.”

  “Nothing in that cupboard?”

  “Only the candlesticks and lamps we used before the electricity.”

  “Did you look in those two trunks?”

  She nodded. “There’s only curtains in that one, and the other’s full of the colonel’s uniforms and tropical clothes. I took a good look through everythi
ng, Mr. Alan.”

  There was nothing, then, for me to do in there. I turned and closed the door behind me. “Very thoughtful of you, Annie,” I said. “It was just an idea I had.”

  “Aye,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing, that she might have left some of her stuff in there. I think she must have burned it all, Mr. Alan.”

  “Maybe she did,” I said. I turned up the corridor. “Well, good night, Annie. Sorry I disturbed you.”

  “Good night, Mr. Alan.”

  I went back through the swing door to my room, disappointed, for I had expected to find something in the boxroom. It seemed to me to be by far the best hiding place for a suitcase on the top floor of Coombargana. I sat down in the long easy chair before the fire in my bedroom and lit a cigarette, and loosened one of the straps below my left knee which had been chafing a little. I sat there smoking and wondering about places where a suitcase could be hidden, and then it seemed to me that possibly the boxroom wasn’t such a good place, after all. It was too obvious. Both Annie and I had thought of looking there after a very few hours. Perhaps she had been cleverer than that.

  It was conceivable that she had simply put her suitcase in one of the empty bedrooms, or even in my own room, working on the principle that a thing that is in practically full view is frequently overlooked. It did not seem a very likely one, but I got up and took my torch and made a tour of the top floor of the house, going into all the rooms and opening all the drawers and cupboards. It did not take me very long and it yielded nothing.

  There was only one other place, and that was in the roof. The possums used to get in to the roof of Coombargana House to nest when I was a boy, though the measures that my father had taken seemed to have defeated them and I don’t think we had had them in the house for a number of years. I had been up into the roof once or twice on possum hunts twenty-five years ago. It was reached by a trap in the ceiling of the corridor outside Helen’s room, ten or eleven feet above the floor, inaccessible without a ladder.

  Where had I seen a ladder? I had seen one somewhere, very recently, a ladder of light alloy, painted red. It was a fire ladder. I remembered it. It hung on hooks along the wall of the servants’ corridor above three fire extinguishers. It was to put out of the window of the corridor to reach down to the flat roof of the scullery in case fire isolated people on the top floor of the building.

  It was worth having a look up in the roof, and I could probably manage to get up and down the ladder if I was careful and took my time. I opened the swing door wide and went in to the servants’ quarters, hoping that Annie wouldn’t come out again, and took the ladder down from the wall, and carried it in to the main house, shutting the swing door behind me. I set it up in the corridor and poked the trapdoor upwards with the top end of it; it stood at a convenient angle, firm and adequate.

  It would be very dirty in the roof and I was in my evening clothes. Moreover, for a man with my disability to get up in to a roof would be something of a gymnastic feat entailing much use of the arms; I had developed a good deal of muscular strength in my arms and chest in compensation over the years. I went back into my room and put on an old pair of trousers and a pullover, and then, with the torch in my pocket, I went up in to the roof.

  Getting up in to the roof wasn’t too difficult, but when I was up there there were only a few planks laid loosely on the rafters above the plaster ceiling, with nothing to hold on to if I stood up. I looked around and there was nothing unusual to be seen; various tanks and water pipes, and brick chimneys, and electrical conduits. I hesitated to stand up and walk upon the planks and crawled along on hands and knees away from the trapdoor and the ladder, till in the end I found what I was looking for.

  It stood upon the rafters behind one of the tanks and in an angle formed by the brickwork of a chimney, a little shadowed place where it might have rested for fifty years and never come to light. It was a small suitcase, fairly new and free from dust or dirt. It had the initials J.P. embossed on the lid, and it was locked.

  There was a bit of rope up there lying on the rafters, perhaps some relic of our possum hunts, and with this I lowered the case down through the trapdoor into the corridor. I replaced the trap and eased myself carefully down the ladder to the floor, and took the case into my room. I was very dirty, and I washed my hands before doing anything else. Then I replaced the ladder on the wall of the servants’ corridor, and went back to my room, and put the suitcase on a table by the fire.

  I knew where the key was, of course. There had been three keys on a ring in her bag, but I was reluctant to go back into her room to take them from her. I had a bunch of keys of my own for my own suitcases and for the trunks that were on their way to me by sea, and I tried these all in turn to see if I had one which would unlock her suitcase.

  I failed; none of them would fit. There was nothing for it; with a heavy heart I went back through the swing door, and opened the door into her room. It seemed a despicable thing that I was doing. The girl had been in trouble and she was dead, lying there beneath the sheet in the room with me. She had gone to great pains to maintain some privacy in her affairs. Now she was dead and could no longer defend herself; I had all but breached her privacy and now I was robbing her bag, to find out things about her that she wanted to keep from us.

  Standing by the chest of drawers opening her bag I imagined I could feel the horror and the protest from the girl beneath the sheet upon the bed behind me. I whispered, “My dear, I’m sorry to be doing this to you,” and took the keys, and thrust the bag back into the drawer, and got out of her room and through the swing door and back to my own place as quickly as I could.

  I was in no hurry to open her case, now that I could do so. I was a little shaken and upset, and not at all sure that I was doing the right thing. I left the keys lying on the suitcase and went slowly downstairs to the drawing room. There were still red embers in the grate and warmth in the room, and I poured myself another whiskey and soda to steady my nerves. The clock struck eleven while I was doing so.

  I stood in front of the fire, glass in hand, recovering my self-possession. I was intensely reluctant to open that case. To do so would clearly be to act in opposition to the dead girl’s earnest wish, and one should respect the wishes of the dead. The Law might require me to do so, but I had the power to tell the Law to go jump in the lake, for nobody but I knew that the case existed. There was no evidence that the slightest harm would come to anybody if I took that suitcase now and thrust it deep into the central heating furnace, and if I did that I should certainly be carrying out the dead girl’s wish.

  On the other hand, I was responsible for the happiness and well-being of everybody in our little community so far as lay within my power. Amongst our little party there had been enormous, catastrophic grief that had made this girl take her life. Unless I knew what it was that grief might come again. It might be something that did not affect Jessie Proctor alone. It might be something to be rooted out of Coombargana, some evil that had grown up with the aging of my father and relaxation of the firmness of control. We might have got a sadist or a pervert of some kind on the property. If I left this uninvestigated the grief might come again, upon some other person. Some other person might now be suffering as this girl perhaps had suffered.

  It was my job to open up that case and see if I could find out what the trouble had been. A brief inspection by the coroner might have to follow, but after that it could all go into the fire and the sooner the better. But opened it would have to be.

  I went up to my room again presently, with a quiet mind. There was nothing now to wait for; I shut the door carefully behind me and turned the key in the lock. Then I went over to the fire side and opened the case upon the table with one of her keys.

  It was full of papers of all sorts, neatly arranged. There were letters and bank books, and about a dozen quarto manuscript books at the bottom. I shuffled through the things on top, and her passport caught my eye. I pulled it out, and stood dumbfounded by the
name upon the cover. I opened it and had a little difficulty in turning the pages, for my fingers were all thumbs. I stared at the photograph that stared back from the page at me, the broad, square, kindly face that I remembered so well, the bushy dark eyebrows.

  This wasn’t Jessie Proctor. It was Janet Prentice.

  Leading Wren Janet Prentice, that I had met with Bill in April 1944, at Lymington in Hampshire, before the invasion of Normandy.

  3

  THERE WERE LITTLE, practical jobs to be done mechanically that saved me the necessity of thinking for a minute or two. I started to unpack her papers on to the table and arrange them into little heaps in order that I might examine them methodically, and very soon I came upon the photograph frame. It was a little leather thing that opened like a wallet to stand upon a table, that held two photographs beneath a cellophane glaze. I stood for a long time with it open in my hand. I knew one of them; it was the one that Bill had had taken by an indifferent professional photographer in Portsmouth, when he had been in training with the Royal Marines at Eastney. It showed him in the uniform of a private before he had attained a rank, rather a stiff, hack portrait. My mother has a print of it that stands upon the table in her room, with one of Helen and one of me. I wondered what she would have thought if she had known that her house parlourmaid had a copy of it, too.