PH02 - Do Not Disturb (24 page)

Dick, who had obviously been imbibing for some time, leaned across the counter and stuck his nose in the laborer’s face. “I don’t want the bleeding lighthouse built, mate. And if you build it up again, I’ll be back to knock it down again, won’t I.”

For a moment the Londoner stared at Dick in astonishment, then with a howl of rage grabbed the publican by his collar and dragged him over the counter, yelling, “We lost our bleeding wages because of you, you bastard!”

Before Baxter could move, a dozen men surged up to the two combatants and joined in the fracas, pinning Baxter into the corner. He lunged forward, only to meet a solid fist to the nose.

The last thing he remembered was seeing a dozen circles of light, all rotating around each other through the smoky haze.

“It weren’t half queer, the way she did it,” Gertie told Mrs. Chubb who, much to her delight, was hanging on her every
word. “Just sort of waved this jewel around, she did, and I fell fast asleep. When I woke up, she said everything would be all right in a day or two.”

Mrs. Chubb looked impressed. “How did she do that, then?”

Gertie polished the fork in her hand with renewed vigor. It amazed her how much better she felt. Like a new person. “She used to be a doctor,” she told Mrs. Chubb, “the kind what puts people to sleep, then tells their mind what to do. She said as how I wasn’t pregnant, but because I was worried about it, that’s what was holding everything up. She said that now the worry was gone and I was relaxed, it will all sort itself out again.”

Mrs. Chubb nodded. “Marvelous. Shame about her face, though.”

“Yeah.” Gertie stopped polishing and stared into space. “She said she’d always been upset about her looks, ’cos she’s so big and clumsy. Her parents were German, she said, and all her family’s like that. She said she always thought men liked their women tiny and helpless, like.”

She glanced down at her own generous curves. “Gawd help me, then, that’s all I can say.”

“Not all men like small women, otherwise the big ones would never get married.”

“Yeah, well, she knows that now. But she said that’s why she never got married, ’cos she never gave a bloke a chance to get to know her.”

Mrs. Chubb gave a start of surprise. “Then she’s not a widow?”

“Nah.” Gertie shook her head. “See, when her house caught fire and she got her face burnt, it left her looking so ugly, she said no man would ever look at her after that. So she pretended to everyone she was a widow and covered herself with that veil.”

She sighed and put down the fork. “Funny thing is, when you get used to it you don’t notice it so much. I mean, it isn’t that bad. But that’s why she went out at night—it was the only time she would walk along the beach without her veil.
Said she loved to feel the wind on her face, but didn’t want people staring at her.”

“What a shame.” Mrs. Chubb counted out a pile of serviettes. “There are some men out there who don’t care what a woman looks like. It’s what she’s like inside that counts.”

“Yeah. Like that Mr. Rawlins.”

Mrs. Chubb looked up sharply. “Mr. Rawlins? What’s he got to do with anything?”

Gertie smiled. “Well, he’s the one what got Mrs. Parmentier to take off her veil. Said she had a beautiful body. Said he wanted to paint it. When she told him she had a terrible scared face, he made her let him look at it.” She picked up another fork and smiled at her reflection in it.

“Go on,” Mrs. Chubb said, her counting forgotten. “So what happened?”

“Well, when he saw it, he said it wasn’t nearly as bad as she made out. That it didn’t matter what her face looked like. He could tell she was a loving, caring person, and that’s what matters.”

Gertie looked up, her eyes sparkling. “She said it made her think, and he gave her the courage to face the world again, even if people did stare at her. She’s even going back to being a doctor again. And it’s all thanks to Mr. Rawlins.”

“Well, that’s a turn-up for the books, to be sure. Whoever would have thought it?”

“It just goes to show,” Gertie said thoughtfully, “you can’t tell what people are really like just by looking at them. Most of the time they’re a lot different than what you think.”

“You never said a truer word than that, Gertie, my girl.”

“Anyway, Mrs. Parmentier seemed quite taken with Mr. Rawlins. Wouldn’t it be lovely if he fell in love with her and they lived happy ever after?”

“Go on, you silly goose,” Mrs. Chubb said. “Full of romantic notions you are. Better get on with your work before Michel gets back and starts complaining.” But she said it with a twinkle in her eyes.

* * *

Cecily looked around the neat room, trying to decide where to start. The chest of drawers seemed a likely place, but she was quite sure that if Louise was hiding anything as dangerous as a poisonous drug, she wouldn’t casually leave it in a drawer, where anyone could find it.

Not that she would be expecting anyone to be searching her room, of course, Cecily told herself as she crossed to the chest. She had to start somewhere.

She pulled the drawers open one by one, hating what she was doing but acknowledging the necessity of it. The piles of neatly folded underwear slipped through her fingers. Louise Atkins believed in buying the best.

Pure silk and glossy satin, delicate lace-trimmed petticoats and hand-embroidered drawers all shouted of a woman used to wealth and luxury.

Feeling very much like a common intruder, Cecily went on searching through the various drawers without much success. She found nothing out of the ordinary, and obviously she would have to ferret out a more sophisticated hiding place.

Climbing onto her hands and knees, she peered under the bed. Nothing but a few dust balls. Carefully she ran her fingers along the iron frame, hoping to find a container of some sort, and terrified of pricking her finger if she did.

She didn’t hear the door open. The first she knew of someone’s presence was when a voice asked quietly, “Is this what you are looking for?”

Cecily jerked her head up, then scrambled to her feet, her heart hammering wildly.

Louise stood just inside the doorway, holding a short length of bamboo pipe. She wore a faint smile on her face, but her eyes were cold and calculating. The eyes of a killer.

Cecily sought frantically in her jumbled mind for any reason, no matter how absurd, to explain her presence. She could come up with nothing. She was in a public house, searching under the bed in what had been a locked room. There simply was no explanation for that.

She looked helplessly at Louise, who seemed to be enjoying her predicament. The perception sent chills chasing down Cecily’s back.

“It really will be a quick death,” Louise said in a conversational tone, “though I can’t promise it will be painless. I have already loaded the pipe with enough poison to kill three men. It will do you no good to attempt to avoid the dart. I have excellent aim.”

Desperately Cecily tried to make her cold lips move. If she could keep the woman talking long enough, perhaps Baxter would come and investigate. It was possible he had seen Louise arrive and was, at this very moment, rushing up the stairs to her rescue.

Before she could speak, Louise added calmly, “My husband taught me how to use it, as a means of self-defense, since I was living alone in the city so much. I would consider this a case of self-defense, would you not? It should be a simple matter to drag your dead body to the stairs and push it down. They will merely assume that the murderer has struck again, in the halls of the George and Dragon.”

She laughed, a dry, hollow sound that frightened Cecily far more than her words had done. The woman was quite insane, her brain turned, no doubt, by so many deaths in her family.

Helplessly Cecily watched as Louise began to lift the pipe slowly to her mouth.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Louise said softly. “I have only to hit the skin on any part of your body, and in seconds you will be quite, quite dead.”

CHAPTER
20

Baxter blinked as he felt strong hands helping him to his feet. He shook his head, his eyes watering at the pain in his nose. Good Lord, he thought, he must have been hit by a train.

The room whizzed around him a couple of times, then slowed, as if he were on a roundabout at the fair.

“Give him a brandy,” someone said, and pressed a cold glass into his hand.

He stared down at it, realizing where he was and how he’d come to feel as if he’d been thrown down a cliff. He was in the bar at the George and Dragon. It seemed very quiet. Apparently the fight was over.

Hard on the heels of that thought came another one.
Cecily
. How long had he been out? He threw back his head and emptied the glass into his open mouth. The fiery liquid
burned all the way down to his stomach, but it had the desired effect.

His eyes snapped open and, coughing, he spun around to look out of the window. With a rush of relief he saw no sign of Cecily behind the oak tree.

Beside him, Ian said, “Took quite a bashing there, Mr. Baxter, I must say. Hope you’re feeling better now?”

Baxter heard the hint of admiration in Ian’s voice and smiled thinly. “Yes, thank you. My head is harder than it looks. May I reimburse you for the brandy?”

Ian shook his head. “It was on the house. Dick was sorry about you getting socked.”

Baxter looked over at the publican, who looked a little dazed, but otherwise still functioning. “He has a lot more to be sorry about, I’m sure. When the police get word that he was responsible for the damage to the lighthouse project, he’ll no doubt have to face charges. He will most likely have to pay for the new equipment.”

Ian laughed and laid his finger along on his nose. “Nah, not on your life. All he’ll do is hand out a few bottles of France’s best cognac, and the lads’ll keep quiet about what happened.”

Baxter raised his eyebrows, but before he could comment, Ian added with a grin, “Bet the row upset Dolly’s new waitress, though. Good job she’s moving. She’ll be bloody glad to get out of here, I reckon.”

Baxter stared at him, hoping he didn’t mean what he thought he meant. “Louise Atkins?”

Ian nodded. “Must be her day off. She got back a little while ago. I saw her going past the window when we was all fighting. She must have gone up to her room.”

With a muffled oath Baxter slammed his glass down on the counter. “Come with me,” he ordered Ian, then headed grimly for the stairs.

“Just tell me one thing,” Cecily said, having finally found her voice. “Why would you want to hurt Ian? He doesn’t even know you.”

Louise gave a short laugh. “Very clever, Mrs. Sinclair. I don’t know how you worked that out, but you’re right. Ian Rossiter doesn’t know me. But I think he might very well have known my granddaughter.”

She talked, Cecily thought with a shiver, as though she were holding a normal conversation at some pleasant social event.

“She was abandoned by the father of her unborn child,” Louise went on, “and unable to face the shame of it, she threw herself off Westminster Bridge. She landed on a barge below and broke her neck. She died instantly. That man must pay for his sins.”

Cecily felt a stab of sympathy, but her eyes remained fixed on the bamboo pipe in the other woman’s hand. “But Ian has lived in Badgers End for the past twelve months.”

“I understand he travels to the city most weekends, does he not?”

Cecily frowned. “But if you suspect Ian of being the father, why were the other men killed?”

The hand holding the pipe jerked, sending another cold chill down Cecily’s back. “That stupid detective. I hired him to find the man who seduced my daughter. All I knew about him from the little my granddaughter had told me was his age, vaguely what he looked like, and that he worked down here on the lighthouse project.”

Her best chance, Cecily thought, was to wait until the very last minute, then drop to the floor behind the bed. If, by the grace of God, Louise missed her with the dart, she might possibly have a chance to reach the woman before she could reload the pipe.

That was assuming she had another dart. It was a possibility Cecily couldn’t afford to ignore.

“Anyway,” Louise went on, “when the fool came back from his investigation, he told me he could get nothing from the men he questioned. The best he could do was to narrow it down to three men. So I decided that all three men must die, in order to be sure that the right one paid for what he did.”

Great heavens, Cecily thought. Now she knew the woman was insane. “But why did you—” she began, but Louise cut her off, freezing her blood.

“Enough of this talk. I’m afraid, Mrs. Sinclair, you have asked your last question. It is really a shame that you couldn’t keep your nose out of my business. I am so sorry I have to do this.”

Cecily tensed as Louise lifted the pipe to her lips, then closing her eyes, she dropped to the floor. As she did so she heard the door handle rattle, a loud thud, and a muffled exclamation.

Without thinking, she raised her head, in time to see Louise staring at her hand that was pinned against the wall in front of her face. Baxter stood in the doorway, his face white as a sheet, looking at Cecily as if he’d never seen a woman before.

“Madam! Are you all right? You weren’t hit, were you?”

Too shaken to speak, Cecily shook her head and climbed unsteadily to her feet, her gaze returning to Louise.

She heard Ian mutter, “Bloody hell,” but her attention was on the other woman.

Louise made an odd sound, then turned her head with an awkward, stiff movement, her eyes wide and glaring at Cecily with a horrible fiendish light. “You …” she said in a strangled voice, then clutched her throat.

“Do something, Bax,” Cecily cried, but knew he couldn’t. It was much too late to help the stricken woman.

Louise made a gurgling sound and slowly collapsed onto the floor. She thrust out an arm in appeal, her fingers curled like claws. A terrible rattling sound poured from her throat as her body twisted and curled in violent spasms, and her eyes rolled wildly in her head.

Cecily could watch no more. She sank onto the bed and covered her face with her hands until the awful sound had ceased.