She Died a Lady (22 page)

I knew where to look now. Unless the murderer had been phenomenally careful, it might be possible to prove my case tonight. But was it sensible, or even possible, to go tonight?

If any of the household caught me sneaking out, I should be due for a lecture from Tom that would last a fortnight. But why not? The biggest difficulty in getting away from any house unheard is in starting up a car. But my car wasn’t in the garage; it was standing at the front gate. I could coast down the High Street, which has a slope; then turn round and come back again.

As I got dressed again very hurriedly, there moved in front of me an image of Paul Ferrars’ face, and a recollection of Ferrars saying he could see Dr Luke going out in the middle of the night to do some fool thing. Evidently, they knew my character better than I knew it myself. But this had to be done.

I had finished dressing, all except my shoes, and put an electric torch in my pocket, when I noticed the cup of Ovaltine standing neglected on the table. It was stone cold, but a promise is a promise. I swallowed most of it at a gulp, switched out the light, and opened the door.

The great thing was to get downstairs without being heard. Yet I knew every creaky board in the house; I learned them years ago, when I tried to get in from night calls without waking Laura. A clock ticked asthmatically in the dark hall. Carrying my shoes, I tiptoed downstairs and only once made a board squeak. I was at the front door when something else occurred to me.

A witness.

I must have a witness for what I hoped to find, else they might not believe me even when I found it. So I tiptoed back to the surgery and softly opened the door. It wasn’t necessary to turn on any light. Surgery, nine paces long. Against the opposite wall, the bookcase with calf-leather volumes and the skull on top of it. In line with that, take four paces forward – find the desk – then the chair – sit down – reach the telephone.

And ring Ferrars’ number at Ridd Farm.

A sleepy exchange rang that number for a long time. I could hear the two little ghostly buzzes, pealing insistently in the dark, far away out there on Exmoor. Then it was answered.

‘Uh-huh? What in blazes do you want, wakin’ people up at this time of the night?’

‘Is that you, Sir Henry?’

There was a long pause.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, but this is so important there wasn’t any choice. I’ve got it.’

The voice sharpened. ‘Got what?’

‘The solution. I know how it was done.’

Again a pause.

‘Well … now,’ said the voice. ‘I wondered if you would.’

‘You mean you’ve got it too?’ (He seemed oddly evasive.) ‘Then listen. Could you possibly meet me at the corner of the main road and the Baker’s Bridge road?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes now. Tomorrow may be too late. I know it’s an imposition to ask you, but we may be able to prove a case. Sir Henry, I know exactly
where
those murders were committed.’

There was another curious thing. It was so dark that I could not even see the telephone. This darkness, unaccountably, appeared to have a cotton-wool quality which padded round my head and even partly obscured the tiny voice at the other end of the line.

‘Son, I can’t!’ muttered the voice, coming from far away. ‘I’ve been walkin’ on this toe of mine all day.’

‘Get Ferrars to drive you.’

‘Ferrars isn’t here.’

‘Not there? At half-past twelve? Where is he?’

‘I dunno. But he’s out, and he’s got the car with him.’

‘Then come in your wheel-chair! Come somehow! Come anyhow!’ I was whispering to the phone with fierce urgency, yet my voice sounded distant to my own ears. The cotton-wool padding thickened round; there was a faint prickling at my scalp, extending to the ear-drums. ‘I shouldn’t have asked it except that it means preventing a miscarriage of justice! Will you come?’

‘I’m a loony, I am. All right. Main road and Baker’s Bridge road. When?’

‘As soon as you can make it!’

When I put back the telephone receiver and started to get up, two things happened.

A vertical line of dim light appeared on the wall facing me. The door behind my back was slowly opening and someone had switched on one bulb in the passage. The dim yellow light broadened and fanned out as the door opened. Someone’s shadow appeared on the opposite wall, where stood the bookcase with the skull on top of it. To me there came a fancy – I could always say a dazed fancy – that the head of the shadow rested exactly on the face of the skull opposite, and blotted it out.

Belle Sullivan’s voice whispered:

‘What’s the idea, Doc? What are you doing?’

Then, as I got to my feet, a wave of dizziness flowed up into my head and made it spin. It was only momentary; but for a second I felt I was rocking back on my heels and about to fall.

‘Be quiet!’ I remember whispering.

I got hold of the back of the desk-chair, which creaked slightly, and the dizziness passed. It left only a cotton-wool feeling in the head and a dry taste in the mouth.

‘What’s the idea, Doc? Why are you dressed?’

She was wearing a pair of Tom’s blue-and-white striped pyjamas, which overflowed her small body even though they were turned up many inches at the wrists and trouser-edges. She was also wearing a pair of my slippers. I remember her silhouetted figure, and the dim light touching the worn brown linoleum on the floor.

‘I’m going out,’ I whispered back. ‘I’ve got to.’

‘Why?’

‘Never mind why. And please don’t talk out loud.’

‘Doc, you can’t go out!’ The whispering voice was almost crying. ‘I mean – did you drink that Ovaltine?’

‘Yes.’

‘It had dope in it,’ said Belle.

Such is the power of suggestion, the effect of mere words, that the bright brown silhouetted curls seemed to swim round.

‘Tom gave it to me, but I thought you needed it more than I did. So I put it in that Ovaltine to give you a good night’s rest. You ought to be sleeping like a baby this minute.’

I took my own pulse, and there could be no doubt it was slowing down.

‘What was it,’ I said, ‘and how much?’

‘I don’t know! It was a little red capsule.’

‘One capsule?’

‘Yes.’

Secconal, probably. I held tightly to the back of the desk-chair, and then straightened up.

It is possible, within limits, for the power of the human will to fight a sleeping-drug. We find this in cases of hysterical patients who have a phobia that they can’t sleep. And, since I had taken the drug only a few minutes ago, its full effect would not lay hold and drag down the wits, as into a whirlpool, for many minutes longer. But it sickened me just the same, a physical nausea to have victory perhaps snatched away now.

‘I’m going out just the same.’

‘Doc, I won’t let you!’

My face must have scared her, for she drew back. I patted her shoulder reassuringly as I passed her, feeling a little light and shaky at the knees, but reasonably clear in the head. At the front door I put on my shoes, having a bad wave of dizziness when I lowered my head, and slipped out.

The night air was cold and pleasant. I got into the car, let it coast downhill in the opposite direction until I was some distance from the house, and then started the motor. I backed around, started up again, and – once clear of the dark houses lining the High Street – I travelled that night at a pace I never want to travel again.

What was more, I knew the murderer. It sickened me to think how easily we had been fooled by someone we all knew and liked; but there it was.

The moon was round, bright, and clear white: what they later came to call the bombers’ moon. It was while I was bucketing round a curve past Shire Oak that the ‘unreal’ feeling started to creep over me: a sense of flying through time and space, of being alone with the moon and the hedgerows. I flashed past a car which seemed vaguely familiar, doing about seventy miles an hour. Alone here with …

Look out!

A tree sprang up at me. I felt the thudding lurch of the car, the screech and squeal of brakes, coming from far away. Then I was back on the road again, and flying once more.

Darkness on its way.

Unconsciousness coming.

Steady.

Ahead was the entrance to the Baker’s Bridge road, turning off to the right. I pulled up the car and stopped.

H.M. wasn’t here. He could hardly have got here in this time, but I didn’t think of that. I climbed out, buoyed and upheld by some mysterious force which made me seem to float along, very pleasant except for a tingling in scalp and finger-tips.

Also, I was talking to myself like a drunken man. Every idea that come into my head had to bubble out at the lips. H.M. wasn’t here. I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t wait.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I remember saying aloud. It seemed fiercely important to impress some invisible auditor with this. ‘Doesn’t matter at all! He’ll follow me.’

It never occurred to me that he couldn’t possibly follow. When I said, ‘Meet me at the corner of the main road and the Baker’s Bridge road,’ he must have thought I meant to go to the old studio where so much of terror and anguish had already taken place.

But I wasn’t going there at all.

Instead of turning right, I turned left and crossed the road in the direction of the sea. Between the main road, and the cliffs running parallel with it, lies a vast waste of open ground. It is hilly and hummocky, with sparse scrub trees bent to a permanent slant by the force of the wind. As I staggered over the hummocks, I remember praying aloud – like a wandering seventeenth-century parson – that my wits shouldn’t be pulled away, down a dark and whirling drain, before I could reach the tunnel leading down into the Pirates’ Den.

The caves along our coast were never, contrary to popular belief, smugglers’ caves. For that you must go to South Devon or Cornwall. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it would have been awkward for a smuggler from France to reach North Devon. The caves are natural phenomena honeycombing the cliffs. They have been given picturesque names: Dark-Lantern Hole, Inferno, Caves of the Winds, Pirates’ Den.

And the cave called the Pirates’ Den was the one I wanted.

Its entrance, on the land side, was a tunnel sloping down gently some forty feet underground. Its other entrance, in the outer face of the cliff, was some thirty feet or more above the rocks below. And it was fully half a mile away from the Wainrights’ house along the line of the cliffs.

I took one bleared look back over my shoulder, across the moonlit waste where nothing moved. There was my car in the distance. There was the main road and the Baker’s Bridge road. Then I started to descend.

At first it was a nightmare. You have to crawl into what seems the side of a hill, twist round, and go down three wooden steps that the authorities have put there for sightseers. I had my electric torch, but its light seemed dim.

The entrance here is about a hundred yards from the edge of the cliff. At the foot of the wooden steps you can walk along the tunnel, provided you keep your head down.

This was the worst part, keeping my head down and having black waves come sweeping up across the brain. Once I fell flat. But I didn’t break the torch, and the pain of bruised hands helped to keep me steady. The air in the tunnel was quite fresh, except for its earthy smell; the slope of ground made you stagger and slide on sand, but you could brace yourself with one hand against the damp wall.

Then a strong salt breeze fanned over my face, gushing out of the dark. I could even hear the faint slap-slap of water. It must be close on one o’clock – high tide against the face of the cliff.

Ten steps more, and I was in the Pirates’ Den.

The opening giving on the sea showed as a jagged bluish-white arch of moonlight. Beyond moved sullen black water, reflecting back the light of my torch. It was cold and perishing damp here. Roughly circular, with ribbed and hollowed walls moisture-plastered, this Pirates’ Den might have been fifteen feet across by ten feet high. A rock formation on the wall, vaguely suggesting a skull and cross-bones, had given the place its name.

The light of my torch was growing dim. I played it round, and saw nothing.

Nothing.

The chuckle of the water echoed back hollowly from uneven walls; the skull and cross-bones formation, scratched with people’s initials; the candle-grease on the uneven stone floor, where my footsteps rasped on sand: nothing else.

‘But there’s got to be something!’ a voice cried out, and I heard it din in my ears from echoes. ‘There’s got to be something!’

I couldn’t hold out much longer. Even I recognized that, from far away. The skull and cross-bones blurred; the light of the torch grew more dim. All I could find was the stump of a candle stuck in one ribbed niche of the walls, sheltered from the breeze which blew straight in.

I tried to light the candle, and got it burning on the fifth match. A blurring of eyesight caused its flames to appear several, and to move round each other in slow procession. The skull and cross-bones got more vivid, on the other hand, and became a real death’s head.

‘An automatic pistol,’ the voice started repeating beside my head, ‘ejects its cartridge-cases high and to the right. An automatic pistol ejects its cartridge-cases high and to the right.’

I put the torch in my pocket, shrieked aloud for the strength to hold on to consciousness five minutes more, and began to feel – like a blind beetle – along the walls. The ridges and pits and crevices seemed interminable.

This hundred-to-one chance didn’t seem much. My fingers crept and poked and fumbled and blundered. When I did touch that tiny metal object, lodged away in a furrow of the rock where it had been flung from an exploding .32, it rolled away from me. I had to chase it, frantically fumbling, clear along the crevice before I got it.

Holding it enclosed in two hands, as you might hold a captured insect. I backed and stumbled away from the wall. I closed one eye, steadied the other in a swimming head, and looked at it.

It was the brass cartridge-case of a .32 bullet.

But that wasn’t all. Some dim recollection of another surface brushed, another kind of feeling momentarily under my fingers, sent me back to the wall again. Presently I dragged out – they were as hard to pull as weeds – two objects which I had dreamed of finding but never expected to find. They had been pushed down deep into one crevice. They showed guilt. The cartridge-case was sagely in my waistcoat pocket. I stumbled away still further from the wall, holding one of these new finds in each hand.