Death and Miss Dane Page 10

  “And so he went there to get it. I think perhaps he was…a little crazy with fear. All he could think of was the paper. He knew that Mrs. Zimmerman had lost her memory. He knew that at her age, there was a chance that she would never recover it. But…if she saw that paper…And so he went to get it. And that is all. He was ill, and frightened, and his heart was weak. If I had known he was going tonight…”

  She stopped, and there was silence in the room. After a time the door opened and Bob Castle came in quietly. She stood up and looked at him and spoke tonelessly.

  “Are they—”

  Bob answered the unfinished question.

  “The police are at the Lodge,” he said gently, “they’re waiting for the doctor.”

  They heard her laugh—a sound loud and prolonged and terrible to hear. Bob took her arm and tried to press her into a chair, but she shook him off.

  “You can tell them,” she said, “that they’ll wait a long time for Dr. Veysey. He’s gone.”

  It was Bob who echoed the word.

  “Gone?”

  Mrs. Mitchell was looking at Paul.

  “I told you it was a just world,” she said. “He’s gone—and she’s gone with him.”

  “She?” Bob’s voice was blank.

  “Philippa. Why” she asked, “should he bother with the mother once he realized that the daughter had all the money? They’ve gone, and I’m glad. I’m glad. Soon he’ll find that nobody can get money out of her, and she’ll find that money won’t keep him when he’s tired of her.”

  She moved uncertainly toward the door, and Bob opened it for her. Mr. Dutt put a gentle hand on her arm, and she allowed him to lead her away.

  Nobody spoke when the door closed again. Bob stood looking at Paul and Anabel, and at last he moved towards them.

  “Does Mrs. Zimmerman know?” Paul asked him.

  “Yes. When the police got to the Lodge, I went down and told her. Frances is at the Cottage.” He looked at Anabel. “How did you—”

  “It was the key ring,” Anabel said. “I was sure that Choomy hadn’t given it back to me. I was quite sure I’d walked out to the car and forgotten all about it. Then Choomy, in the office, told his father he’d returned it to me. That didn’t worry me much—a child can make a mistake, or make things up. But I had given him a piece of paper and a pencil, and he was sitting on the floor, drawing, just as he’d sat on the floor playing with my key ring. When he’d finished, he put the pencil back carefully on Frances’ desk, and the paper…” She looked at Paul. “When you asked me for the key ring, I took it out of my pocket and the piece of paper came too; the paper Choomy had been playing with. His father was telling us how tidy he was, and all at once I knew that when I was getting up to go out to your car at the Junction, he had slipped the key ring into my pocket.”

  “And then?” Bob asked.

  “And then I had to decide where I had lost it. Mrs. Edmond had had my coat for a minute, but I didn’t think she’d taken the key ring. I could have lost it when I went out of her house a little later—but if I hadn’t, the only thing that could have happened to it was that…that when I was sitting at the back of the car with Mr. Allenby, I pulled the key ring out of my pocket when I was searching for Mrs. Edmond’s address, and it fastened itself to Mr. Allenby’s coat—and stayed there until it…until it dropped off at Sanctuary. He and I were jammed very close together in the car; it could have happened. But Mr. Allenby didn’t look like a man who would kill another man, and I felt there must be some other explanation.

  “And then…Frances told me about the mail. She said that the local letters were posted at lunch time and got there the same evening. I’d heard people talking about the murder, and I knew that the General had gone without his lunch and had written a letter and posted it by the early post—so I figured he must have written to somebody in the valley.”

  She turned to Paul.

  “That was certainly something to think about, but none of it was definite. And then when Bob and Frances and I were leaving the Cottage after dinner, I heard you tell Bob that Mr. Allenby was going to get out of bed the next day. If what Mrs. Zimmerman remembered about the papers had anything to do with him, I figured he must be planning to go to the Lodge to look for the paper. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed that it might be that way. So I thought I’d go to the Lodge before he had a chance to go there, and see what I could find. But I was too late. When I was walking toward the house I saw somebody, and I thought it was Mr. Allenby, and I got out of the way—and then I saw that it was Mr. Dutt. That sent my conclusions spinning for a minute or two—until I saw a tiny light in the house, and realized that Mr. Allenby must be inside. I found my way in just before Mr. Dutt did. And then we were in the dark, but you were so big I couldn’t mistake who you were, and I was glad to have you there. I knew Mr. Allenby got to you, and I knew he’d hit you, and I…I heard him fall, and then the lights went on and…and I saw your head…” She stopped to steady her voice. “And that’s all,” she said.

  “Not quite all,” said Paul.“Mrs. Zimmerman told me that she’d seen you with the General.”

  For a moment Anabel looked bewildered, and then she smiled.

  “Did she tell you when she saw me with the General?”

  “No. She couldn’t remember when, but she said that your name was Isabel, and that she’d seen you with him.”

  “She was nearly right,” said Anabel. “She did see Isabel with the General, but it was about thirty years ago, and Isabel was Isabel Lessing, her niece—the General’s daughter. And the reason she got us mixed up was because Isabel Lessing, afterwards Isabel Gautier, afterwards Isabel Dane, was my mother.”

  “But . . . but the General’s daughter died,” said Paul slowly. “Mrs. Zimmerman told me. The General’s daughter died shortly after her marriage. She died in a train smash.”

  “Her husband died—and her husband’s mother,” said Anabel. “The names were printed as Monsieur and Madame Claud Gautier, which in one way was correct—but they were mother and son, and not husband and wife. And my mother, when she realized that the General might see the names and think she was dead, wrote to him and explained that it was only her husband who’d died.

  “I know that much because my father told me. The rest I didn’t know until I came to Europe. The General didn’t tell his sister, Mrs. Zimmerman, that her niece was alive; she’d never given up trying to make things right between my mother and the General, and the General knew that things could never be right; he and his daughter had never got on and never would, and things were better the way they were. So he decided that it was better that Mrs. Zimmerman should go on thinking that everything was finished, and he never told her the truth. And he never tried to keep in touch with his daughter. Until about two months ago.

  “Two months ago he wrote to her. He sent the letter to the last address he knew. Mrs. Mitchell said it was a just world; I don’t know about that, but I guess it’s a small one, because the letter arrived…and was sent to me in Spain. When I came to France I’d looked up my mother’s husband’s people—my mother’s first husband’s people, because I wanted to know them. I stayed with them for a time, and I liked them and they liked me—and when I’d left them, they got a letter addressed to my mother, and they sent it on to me. It was from my grandfather. He’d never altered his will, because he never had any idea of cutting his daughter out of it; if she died without children, Mrs. Zimmerman would inherit his property. But things had suddenly changed a little; he’d decided to get married, and soon there’d be a question of making some alterations in his will. He wanted to know whether my mother was alive, whether she had remarried, whether she had had children. In case the letter failed to reach her, he advertised in three or four French papers—and I saw one of the advertisements, and that’s why I said I’d come to the valley in answer to one.

  “I could have written to the General, but I didn’t. I wanted to come here and see him without his knowing who I was. I wanted to loo
k him over. My father always told me that my mother had always come up against granite in him, and in the end had stopped trying to break through it. I didn’t want to get in deep until I’d come to Fern Valley and looked around.

  “I said it was a small world. I came to London and thought it would look kind of right and natural if I came here to work. I went to an employment agency in London and told them I wanted to come here, and they did some telephoning and at last they found a dress shop called Fleury that needed an assistant to go down to the new branch in Devonshire. So I went down to see them, and they took me on and gave me an address to stay at…and I came to Fern Valley. If I’d thought I looked enough like my mother for Mrs. Zimmerman to remember her, I wouldn’t have been so happy about meeting her. But she looked at me, and it seemed all right…until she called me Isabel.”

  There was a long silence.

  “But why didn’t you—” began Bob after a time.

  “—tell the police who I was? I was going to. The night I walked out of Mrs. Edmond’s house I went a little way up the hill and looked at Sanctuary. If it hadn’t been so late I might have gone up there and tried to find out what kind of man my grandfather was. But I didn’t go…and the next morning, I knew it was too late, and…I’m sorry about that.”

  Out of another long silence, Bob spoke wonderingly:

  “And so…Sanctuary is yours?” he said.

  Her eyes, wide and amused, raised themselves to his.

  “Paul’s and mine,” she said.

  THE END

  The Friendly Air

  “Why do you have to? It’s your father’s problem. If you do manage to persuade her to come to London instead of going to York, how do you know she won’t get into your hair instead of his?”

  “She has no claim whatsoever on me. I suppose you could say that she hasn’t much claim on my father either, but she’s always held him responsible for what she calls her disastrous mistake in leaving Edinburgh and burying herself in a bleak Yorkshire village. She said she did it on his advice—and so she’s felt entitled to badger him ever since on every matter, big or small, that she wants cleared up.”

  For the first time, Emma’s interest quickened. She hung the drying-up cloth on a hook, slid back the concealing panel and turned to look at him.

  “Advice? You mean it was simply because he advised her—”

  He frowned.

  “You don’t listen. I’ve tried to make it clear that she’s not a woman who’d take anybody’s advice.”

  “But she did take his advice about leaving Edinburgh and coming down to York?”

  “Yes, she did,” he answered, gratified to find that she was at last evincing some interest in the subject. “It was about the only occasion on which she listened to him. But that’s all ancient history. The only thing that concerns us now is to prevent her from—”

  “You don’t like talking about the beginning of it, do you?” she broke in. “Why on earth not?”

  “Because I see no reason to rake up an episode that shows my father in a rather unfavourable light. It was all over six years ago, and—”

  “I know that. What I’m asking you is what happened before it was over.”

  “I don’t want to discuss it.”

  Her patience splintered.

  “Well, I do,” she stated. “I’m sick of the way you’ve always skated around the topic. Six years ago, your father made a fool of himself. So what? Old men frequently do. I was eighteen at the time, an age at which you’d suppose a girl could be told some of the more sordid facts of life without swooning, but all I got out of my grandfather was the bare fact that your father had remarried. The village talked, of course, and I had good ears. I listened to all I could.”

  “Then you probably got a completely garbled version.”

  “I probably did. So ungarble it. Tell me the terrible truth. Unveil your father’s shame.”

  “Shame?”

  “As you said, garbled. How can you get any help from me in this affair if I am not put into the picture?”

  He hesitated.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “I’ll tell you what happened, but I shall not, now or in the future, allow you to—“

  “—wallow. Mud, mud, glorious mud. Go on—tell me the worst.”

  “There was no worst. It was simply a case of a man of mature years losing his head over an attractive young girl”

  “Where did he meet her?”

  “In Edinburgh. He and I went up from York for the Edinburgh Festival. I was twenty-eight and working, as you know, in my father’s firm of lawyers. The hotels in Edinburgh were charging what he considered inflated prices, so he was pleased when a friend of his told him about a lady—an elderly lady, English, widow of a Scottish baronet—who had a large house in Edinburgh and was prepared to receive one or two guests for the period of the Festival. Screened, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “I resent your tone, and I don’t like your insinuation that my father’s a snob. He—”

  “—just likes carefully screened people round him. Do go on,” she urged impatiently, “and leave out the unessentials.”

  “After an exchange of letters, my father and I went up. It wasn’t at all what we’d hoped to find. The house was quiet enough, but it was extremely uncomfortable. There was only one maid, and the food wasn’t up to much.”

  “Cheap?”

  “It was very expensive, but then — ”

  “I forgot. Scottish baronet’s widow. So?”

  “I went to concerts. My father preferred to go to plays. If our tastes had been similar, if I’d been with him more than I was, if he—”

  “You sound like Kipling. Shouldn’t the heroine enter at this point?”

  “If you persist in—”

  “Where was this attractive young girl?”

  “Staying in the house—the only other guest. She was Lady Grantly’s great-niece.”

  “How attractive?”

  “She was rather small, very pretty, and had auburn hair. Her name was Morag.”

  He paused and brooded, and she went to join him at the fire. Reluctantly, he moved his chair an inch or two farther away from it, and she brought a footstool and sat at his feet. This was the time, she mused, when couples coupled—united after absence, warmed and fed, with coffee bubbling at the end of its electric tail. This was the moment for him to seek response from her relaxed body. Who wrote all those books and plays about characters jumping the matrimonial gun? she wondered. They’d never met Gerald. But even if he did decide to jump, he wouldn’t dream of jumping in this room, which acted on him like an extinguisher. And while his cousin Claud continued to entertain a succession of women in the flat they shared in Chelsea, he couldn’t jump there either, so she was probably fated to be that despised and derided commodity, a virgin bride—and she rather liked the idea, she decided, though she wouldn’t have cared to admit it and risk being looked down on as under-sexed, instead of being looked up to as over-sexed. There didn’t seem to be a norm.

  “Was this Morag sexy?” she inquired.

  “I suppose you could say so. She certainly tried to engage my attention.”

  “You mean she chased you?”

  “If you care to put it like that, yes. I don’t have to tell you that I was of a serious turn of mind.”

  “And still are. Then what?”

  “The concerts took place at night. During the day, I went round Edinburgh, which I had never seen before, and which I found extremely interesting. It’s history—”

  “I’ll read it up. You went to concerts, your father... How old was she?”

  There was a pause.

  “She was seventeen,” Gerald answered reluctantly at last.

  “Seventeen!”

  “And a half.”

  “And your father was fifty-nine. And a half. You were right about mature years. It makes you think of those medieval marriages. What on earth could she have—”

  She stopped,
“—seen in him?” Why ask? He was her godfather and she knew the answer, and knew very well what a sexy seventeen-year-old would have seen. Tall, well-preserved, handsome, with crisp grey hair, blue, quizzical eyes, a kindly manner. He looked like an archdeacon —which was probably why he had chosen to retire to an historic little house in the very shadow of York Minster, a layman in an ecclesiastical setting, discreetly wealthy, respected, pitied for that brief episode during which a scheming girl had taken advantage of him.

  “Go on,” she prompted. “You were enjoying the concerts and didn’t see what was going on. But where was the great-aunt? Where was the Scottish baronet’s widow?”

  “Lady Grantly was never at home. If you believed her, she was running the Festival single-handed. That left my father and Morag together, and nobody knew the first thing about the affair until they announced that they were engaged and were going to be married without delay. You can imagine my feelings!”

  “Never mind your feelings. Proceed.”

  “They were married in Edinburgh, and then they came back to York, to my father’s house—which by that time I had left.”

  “Weren’t you at the wedding?”

  “I was not. I wasn’t even in York when they got back. That was when I transferred myself to a firm of lawyers in London. The marriage lasted four months. Then she found a younger man and went off with him. My father felt nothing but relief.”

  Humiliation too, Emma thought. He wouldn’t have enjoyed the role of deserted husband.

  “So how did the great-aunt, Lady Grantly, get to Yorkshire?”

  “She made more fuss over the affair than all the other relations put together. She said that my father had ruined her position in Edinburgh. The parents were very well-connected and influential, and she said that they blamed her for everything. So my father advised her to sell her house and live near York. He arranged the sale of her house and found her a cottage in Oatfields, which as you know is unfortunately only thirty miles from York. She’s been there ever since, and she probably wouldn’t dream of leaving if this money hadn’t gone to her head. As it is, she decided to buy a house in York, and picked out one next door to the one my father’s been settled in so comfortably for the past two years. She was nuisance enough when she was thirty miles away, but if she comes to live next door, he’ll have to move. He couldn’t stand it. That was why he appealed to me—to us—to try and persuade her to find a house in London instead. And that was why I spent a freezing week-end up there, achieving exactly nothing.”