Dead or Alive: A Frank Garrett Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  “Why should it be flapdoodle?”

  “The answer to why is because,” said Garrett. He laughed rudely. “My good Bill, what would be the point of O’Hara sending his wife that sort of tripe?”

  Bill kept his temper. Garrett was an offensive brute, but he was used to him. He was a cousin in some seventeenth or eighteenth degree. He was an old friend and a good friend, but he had never had any manners.

  “She says that herself,” he remarked.

  “Then it’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever heard her say. There couldn’t possibly be any point about it. It was either a hoax, or she’d had a go of hysterics and done it herself.”

  Bill shook his head.

  “I don’t think so. I’ve known Meg a long time—she’s not like that. Now look here, Garrett, you won’t believe what I’m going to tell you, but I’m going to say it all the same. You shan’t say afterwards that you were kept in the dark.”

  “All right, go ahead.” Colonel Garrett’s little eyes were intent.

  Bill told him about the letters on Meg’s hearth-rug—chopped up pieces of writing-paper to make the word “Alive.”

  Garrett said nothing. He jingled the contents of his pocket and lifted his eyebrows, but he said nothing.

  Bill told him about the blank envelope which had contained a maple leaf with the word “Alive” pricked out on it.

  Garrett’s eyebrows came down and he stopped jingling. He said,

  “The girl’s batty!”

  Bill wasn’t angry. It wasn’t any good being angry with Garrett. He said,

  “No, she isn’t,” and left it at that.

  “All right,” said Garrett, “trot out the exhibits—Daily Sketch, bits of notepaper, blank envelope, dead leaf. I suppose the leaf’s dead if O’Hara isn’t.”

  Bill smiled quite cheerfully. There had been a certain amount of thin ice about. Now that Garrett had smashed it, things felt more comfortable.

  “There aren’t any exhibits. Meg put the Daily Sketch in a drawer—her writing-table drawer—but it went missing the day she found the letters on the hearth-rug. The paper that had been used for them was in the same drawer.”

  “And someone broke in and burgled the leaf, I suppose!” Garrett made a face. “This what you call evidence? It’s sheer lunacy!”

  “O’Hara was an odd chap,” said Bill slowly.

  Garrett got there in a flash.

  “You mean he might be playing cat-and-mouse with her. What terms were they on?”

  Bill didn’t answer that at once. Then he said,

  “You’d better know just where we are. I’ve cared for Meg for ten years. She’s never cared for me. She married O’Hara. He made her damned unhappy. Now she doesn’t know whether she’s free or not. He was a cruel devil—it would be like him to keep her like that, not knowing.”

  Garrett jingled his keys. “It might be. O’Hara was like that.”

  Bill went on speaking.

  “It’s an abominable position. She can’t even get probate.”

  There was something sticking in his mind about those papers in the bank. No, it was a packet of some sort. Meg didn’t know if there were papers in it, she only thought there might be. He didn’t know why they stuck in his mind, but they did.

  Garrett grinned.

  “Do you expect me to believe that O’Hara had anything to leave? I suppose she wants to be sure she’s a widow. She was a fool to marry him—but women are fools, especially girls. Now look here, Bill—O’Hara’s dead. I told her so when she came to see me. He’s dead, and he’ll stay dead. The body they got out of the river in December was his all right. Stripped—and ordinary identification impossible, but there had been an old break of the right leg. I happen to know O’Hara broke that leg about five years ago. We didn’t identify him at the inquest because it didn’t suit our book. We were still hoping to pick up the trail he was on. We most particularly didn’t want any headlines in the papers. What Mrs O’Hara wants to do is to go and see her lawyer and get leave to presume death. We’ll back her up—now. There needn’t be any publicity. Tell her to see her lawyer at once. All this about letters, and leaves, and snips of paper is either a hoax, or it’s hysterics. O’Hara’s as dead as Julius Caesar—she needn’t worry.”

  He got up, went over to the other side of the room, clattered at a drawer, and came back with an untidy note-book in his hand. He sat down again on the arm of the chair and flicked at the crumpled pages.

  “Here you are—October ’33. First entry about O’Hara on the 3rd. He was due to report, and he didn’t report.… October 4th—rang up Mrs O’Hara. O’Hara missing. She wanted to know where he was. So did we. We gave it another forty-eight hours, and then we began to make enquiries. Nobody had seen O’Hara since eight o’clock on the evening of the 1st, when he walked out of his flat. Nobody’d seen him. Nobody’d heard from him. He never turned up, and he never will.” He shut the note-book with a snap. “You tell Mrs O’Hara to see her lawyer and get on with it!”

  Bill Coverdale was sitting up.

  “You say nobody saw O’Hara after the first of October?”

  “One Oct: thirty-three,” said Garrett laconically.

  “Well—I saw him.”

  “You?”

  “I. And I can fix the date, because I sailed for South America next day, and I sailed on the fifth.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Dead sure. But you can verify it if you want to.”

  Garrett fished a pencil out of his pocket and sucked the end of it.

  “All right, if you’re sure. You saw O’Hara on the fourth. That’s four days after anyone else did. Where did you see him? What was he doing? Who was he with?”

  “He was in a taxi,” said Bill Coverdale. “It was somewhere short of midnight, because my train was a bit late, and it was due at eleven.”

  “Where were you coming from?”

  “King’s Cross. I’d been up north, and I’d run it fine, so I was in a hurry. I was sailing the next day. I was held up at a crossing, and I saw O’Hara go by in a taxi. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, and barring that it was somewhere between King’s Cross and Piccadilly Circus I can’t say where the hold-up was. I just didn’t think anything about it.”

  Garrett scribbled in his note-book.

  “You’re sure it was O’Hara?”

  Bill nodded.

  “Oh, yes, it was O’Hara.”

  “And it was a taxi, not a private car?”

  Bill shut his eyes for a moment.

  “Yes, it was a taxi—one of those green ones.”

  Garrett scribbled again.

  “You’re twelve months after the fair. We might have got on to the taxi if we’d known at the time. Was he alone?”

  Bill Coverdale got up and walked to the window. Like Garrett he frowned at the hygienic flats, but unlike Garrett he did not see the bright blank windows or the staring concrete. He saw O’Hara in a taxi at midnight—O’Hara with every feature clear and distinct, and beyond him, close at his shoulder, a woman. The anger which he had felt then swept over him again. To have Meg for his wife, and to go chasing off with that sort of girl! He tried to visualize her and failed.… Yet he had had the impression that she was that sort of girl. There must have been something to give him that impression.

  Garrett repeated his question impatiently.

  “Was he alone?”

  And with that Bill turned back to the room again.

  “No, he wasn’t. There was a girl with him.”

  “See her face?”

  “I suppose I did. I can’t describe her.”

  “You’re being damn useful!” said Garrett with a growl in his voice. “All this is about as much use as a sick headache. You’re sure there was a girl?”

  “Yes, I’m sure of that.”

  “You wouldn’t know her again, or anything like that?”

  Bill was half turned away. He was frowning deeply. Behind that impression of his there must
be something if he could only get hold of it. He said without knowing what he was going to say,

  “I never said I wouldn’t know her again.”

  Chapter Four

  Bill Coverdale walked back to his hotel. It seemed pretty fairly certain that O’Hara had been dead for the best part of a year. That being the case, the next thing to do was to follow Garrett’s advice and take any steps that were necessary to get O’Hara pronounced dead legally. Garrett seemed to think there wouldn’t be any trouble about it.

  He began to wonder how soon he could ask Meg to marry him. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to give her things. He wanted to take her out of London. He had a picture in his mind of an open car, and himself and Meg, and the luggage in behind, and nothing to stop them going anywhere they chose. October could do some pretty good weather for touring when it gave its mind to it, and the weather this year seemed to have got into the habit of being fine. They could go to Scotland. They could go to Wales. They could go to Cornwall. They could go anywhere they chose.

  Bill indulged this dream for a little, and then woke coldly. He hadn’t had the faintest reason to suppose that Meg would marry him. Why should she? “She wants looking after. She’s never wanted you to look after her. If she had, she wouldn’t have married O’Hara. If she had, she’d have married you five years ago.” That was when he had first asked her—on her twentieth birthday. He hadn’t asked her before because she was so young and it didn’t seem fair, but lots of girls married at twenty. Meg had just laughed at him.

  “Bill darling—how silly! I know you much, much, much too well, and I’m much, much, much too fond of you. I don’t want to marry for ages and ages, but when I do, I expect it’ll be someone I don’t know a bit, so that I’ll have all the thrill of being an explorer—you know, the ‘I was the first that ever burst into that silent sea’ sort of feeling.”

  “You wouldn’t be,” Bill had said with sturdy common sense.

  “I don’t suppose anyone ever is, but it’s a most thrilling romantic feeling.”

  “And I’m not romantic.”

  “Darling angel, how could you be? I’ve known you since I was fifteen.”

  That had always been the burden of it—she knew him too well, and she liked him too much. And she married Robin O’Hara whom she did not know at all.

  Bill walked, frowning, into a telephone-box and dialled in. Presently Meg’s voice came along the wire.

  “Yes—who is it?”

  “Bill,” said Bill Coverdale.

  “Oh—hullo, Bill!” Her voice, which had been a little breathless, sounded pleased.

  “I want you to dine with me.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “You don’t need to think—I’m doing the thinking. Where would you like to go? I thought about the Luxe.”

  “Bill, I really don’t think—”

  “I thought we might do a theatre. What have you seen?”

  “Nothing.”

  “All right, I’ll call for you at a quarter to seven.”

  “Bill, I haven’t got any clothes.”

  “Well, the best people don’t seem to be wearing them much.”

  “You don’t mind if I’m terribly out of date?”

  “I’ll bear up, I expect. Quarter to seven, Meg.” He rang off.

  He was rather pleased with himself because he had resisted the temptation to tell her that it didn’t matter what she wore, because she always looked nicer than anyone else anyhow. It didn’t do to say that sort of thing if you could help it. You might feel like a door-mat, but so sure as you let a girl know it, she started walking all over you. Meg would be much more likely to marry him if he kept his end up. From which it will be perceived that that devout lover Mr William Coverdale was not without a spice of the serpent’s wisdom.

  Meg hung up the receiver. She ought to have said no, but it was such ages since she had been out anywhere—such ages, and ages, and ages. It would be nice to dine with Bill, nice to get out of the flat, and very, very nice not to have bread and margarine for supper. Last week there had been cheese, but now there was so little money left that it was bread and margarine, and scraps at that, with the tea-leaves saved from breakfast to make something you could pretend was a cup of tea. Of course she ought to have given up her telephone the minute she lost her job, but it seemed like the last link with her friends. Only everyone had been away holiday making, so it hadn’t really been much good after all, and now that people were coming back again, the telephone would have to go, and she would have to sell something to pay the quarter’s rent and the calls she had had.

  She pushed all that away. She was going to dine at the Luxe and go to a theatre. The question was, what was she going to wear? She hadn’t anything that was less than two years old. It was two years and a month since she had married Robin O’Hara, and it hadn’t run to any new clothes since then.

  She went into her bedroom, opened the wardrobe door, and stood there considering.… Not her wedding dress. She had worn it many times since, but looking at it now, all those other times faded away.…

  For better, for worse—for richer, for poorer.…

  The better and the richer had faded out in the first month, leaving her only the worse and the poorer part.

  No, not her wedding dress.

  There wasn’t much choice really. She had never liked the pink lace. Pink wasn’t her colour, but Robin had said he thought he would like her in pink. And then when she wore it, he had stared at her coldly and told her she was losing her looks. No, she certainly wasn’t going to wear the pink.

  It would have to be the black georgette. She put it on, and thought it didn’t look so bad. Uncle Henry had given her a cheque, and it had cost a lot two years ago. Meg looked at herself in the glass, and thought she was too thin for black, and too pale. She could put on some colour, but the little knobs on her spine showed all the way down the open back. She shifted the hand-mirror this way and that, and thought what ugly things bones were, and what a pity the dress was cut so low, and then slid off into thinking what a lot it had cost, and how out of sight was out of mind. There was Uncle Henry with lots of money, and she’d lived with him from the time she was fifteen to the time she married, and he had paid all her bills without a murmur and given her nice fat cheques for her birthday and Christmas, and things like that, and then the very minute she married Robin he didn’t seem to mind what happened to her any more—just vague and affectionate when they met, but no more cheques. It was a whole year since she had seen him now, and he hadn’t even bothered to answer her letters. He had just faded out, and Bill might say what he liked, she wasn’t going to write again and have that Cannock woman sending one of her white mouse letters and saying how busy Mr Postlethwaite was, and how important it was that he shouldn’t be disturbed.

  Meg was quite ready at a quarter to seven. She wore the black georgette, and she had fastened one of the long scarf-ends on the left shoulder with the brooch which Bill had given her for her twenty-first birthday—two diamond daisies and a leaf. She had been in two minds whether to wear it or not, but in the end she put it on. Other people faded, but Bill didn’t—Robin, Uncle Henry, people you thought were your friends, but never Bill. So why shouldn’t she wear his brooch? She didn’t look pale any longer. She had tinted her cheeks and brightened her lips, and to Bill she was the old pretty Margaret of two years ago, only she was too thin. It went to his heart to see her so thin.

  They dined at the Luxe and then went on to the theatre. The two years might never have been at all. It was just like one of their old times together. Meg was young. She had been unhappy for a long time, and now quite suddenly the burden of that unhappiness seemed to have lifted. She felt as if she had had an illness and it was over, and the tides of health were flowing in again. She felt a consciousness of strength and of renewing. The flat had been full of tired, sick, frightened thoughts, and she had come away from it and left them behind her. The music pleased her, and the lights—the laughing
voices, and the new queer frocks. Hers must be frightfully out of date, but it didn’t matter—Bill had always had a way of making you feel better dressed and better looking that you really were. Darling old Bill—she was very glad she was wearing his brooch.

  They talked about the old times down at Way’s End—Meg’s procession of governesses—the one who thought her such a tomboy and wanted her to wear gloves in the village—the one who used cheap scent—the one who tried so hard to marry the Professor that even he became aware of it in the end and ran away to Vienna to a congress—

  “I ought to have gone to school,” said Meg. “If you’re an only child you ought always to go to school, because otherwise you don’t make any friends. Of course I should have screamed with rage if Uncle Henry had tried to send me, because there were you and Jerry Holland, and I didn’t want anyone else. But when Jerry went to India and you went to Chile, there didn’t seem to be anyone at all.”

  “Well, I’ve come back,” said Bill cheerfully. “Meg, why did the Professor leave Way’s End? I thought he was dug in there for life.”

  Meg nodded.

  “So did I. I was most awfully surprised. I—I hadn’t been seeing him much, and then in September—September last year—I wrote and said could I go down for a bit. I felt as if I must get away, but he wrote back to say he was going to move. Of course I wanted to know why, and all about it. This time Miss Cannock wrote, and she said the village was getting so noisy with motor horns and dogs, and Uncle Henry felt he must have perfect quiet because he was going to start the book he’d been collecting notes for ever since I was born. I can’t remember what it was going to be called, because I never can remember the names of any of Uncle Henry’s things, but it was ‘Meta—something-or-other’—or perhaps I’m mixing it up with something else. Is there such a word as metabolism?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Do you know what it means?”

  “Not an idea.”

  Meg sighed.

  “I haven’t either, but it doesn’t really matter. Anyway the Cannock said Uncle Henry had bought an island, and he was going there so that he could write his book without being disturbed. Well, I was feeling awfully desperate, so I went down to Way’s End without saying I was coming.”