She Died a Lady (4 page)

Rita stopped short, drawing together her thin eyebrows. Her expression was so bewildered that I could not help believing it was genuine.

‘What on earth are you talking about? I didn’t cut any telephone-wires. I don’t know anything about them.’ A curious look flashed through her eyes. ‘
Are
they cut? In our house? What do you think it means?’

Giving me no chance to answer, she opened the front door and hurried in.

The big sitting-room of the bungalow was lighted. So was the dining-room behind it. Furnished in blue and in white satin, with a soft glow of yellow-shaded lamps, the sitting-room showed little trace of seediness or neglect. Over the fireplace hung Rita’s portrait, by Paul Ferrars. The brass andirons glistened, the rugs were thick, a bottle and syphon stood on a side table.

Alec Wainright sat by the radio, with a whisky and soda in his hand.

‘Er – hello, my dear,’ murmured Alec. He lifted his glass and drank. It seemed to warm and brighten him. ‘We’ve been looking for you.’

Rita spoke in a muffled voice.

‘Barry and I were over at the tennis court.’

‘Ah. Have a good time?’

‘It was all right. Have you done the black-out? This is Martha’s night out, remember.’

‘All done, my dear,’ replied Alec, sweeping his glass. ‘All done by our little hubby. We’re going to have a lot of fun tonight.’

Rita looked like a tragedy-queen. You could almost see her gritting her teeth. She seemed torn between a very genuine tenderness for Alec, who was making obvious efforts to come out of his daze, and an equally genuine desire to throw something at him. The former feeling conquered. Rita spoke with an effort at brightness and even coyness.

‘What’s all this Dr Luke is telling me about somebody cutting the telephone-wires?’

Alec’s face clouded.

‘It was that damned Johnson,’ he said. ‘Sneaked in here and cut ’em. Did it just to spite me. It’s not serious. But if we had to phone the fire-department or the police or somebody like that …’

‘I want a drink,’ said Rita. ‘Why in heaven’s name doesn’t somebody give me a
drink
?’

‘There on the table, my sweet. Help yourself. We won’t let the doctor scare us tonight. This is a special night.’

‘I want a drink with ice in it,’ Rita almost screamed at him.

Her voice went up with shattering effect before she controlled herself. Though she tried to smile at me, indicating that everything was all right, her hands were shaking nevertheless. Rita walked across this room into the dining-room. The little wooden heels of her sandals clacked on the hardwood floors. At the door of the kitchen she paused and turned round again.

‘I’d rather be
dead
,’ she cried through the two rooms: not loudly, but with extraordinary intensity. Then she slapped open the swing door, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Alec only looked mildly surprised. Seen sideways under a lamp, his broad blunt-featured face was less shrunken and dead-looking. The broad mouth quivered occasionally, but not often. He had washed his face, brushing the scanty grey hair carefully.

‘A bit off-colour, I imagine,’ he said. ‘Too much exercise in this heat. That’s what I always tell her – Ah, my boy, come in! Sit down! Pour yourself something to drink!’

We could hear the rain pattering on the roof of the bungalow. Barry Sullivan came in from the hall, dusting his hands on a handkerchief. The instant defensiveness of his manner, the way in which he seemed mentally to shy back, should have been as plain as print to Alec. This young man was suffering from a guilty conscience far worse than Rita’s.

‘Thanks, sir,’ said Barry, and picked up the bottle from the table. ‘I’d like a shot, if you don’t mind. I don’t use it ordinarily. But tonight –’

‘Tonight’s a special occasion. Eh?’

The glass slipped out of Barry’s fingers, clattered on the table, and rolled off to the floor. But it landed on a rug, and did not break. The tall young man was down after it in an instant, falling on his knees like a collapsing clothes-horse. He did not look at Alec when he got up.

‘I must be the clumsiest ox in the world!’ he declared, gesturing with such violence that this time he nearly broke the glass against the bottle. ‘I can’t imagine what made me do that. It slipped. Look! It slipped just like this.’

Alec chuckled. The nerve twitched faintly at his eyelid.

‘My dear boy! Don’t mention it! So long as you didn’t break the bottle!’ (Alec was so pleased with this that his chuckle became a whinny of mirth.) ‘Now sit down. At eighty-thirty we’re going to turn on the radio –’

‘Radio?’

‘For a play Rita wants to hear.’ He looked at me. ‘It
is
the
Romeo and Juliet
one. I looked it up in the
Radio Times
. Then we’ll be just right for the news at nine. By George, you know, I’m rather sorry I didn’t invite Paul Ferrars and that guest of his.’

The swing door to the kitchen creaked open. Rita, carrying a gin-and-lemon combination in a tumbler which tinkled with ice, walked through the dining-room on rapping heels.

‘What’s that about Paul Ferrars?’ she asked rather sharply. And instinctively, as she lifted the glass to her lips, her eyes moved to her own portrait above the mantelpiece.

Whether or not Paul Ferrars can paint may be a matter for debate among the critics. All I can say is that the picture here seemed extraordinarily good to me. It was a half-length. Ferrars had painted her in an evening gown, with a diamond necklace at her throat and diamond bracelets on her wrists. This last touch had seemed bad taste to Rita; but it was Alec’s suggestion and he was extremely pleased with it.

Yet a touch of parody showed in that portrait. Though it was undeniably Rita and emphasized her beauty, there were touches about her half-smile which might not have pleased Alec if he had been able to understand them. Rita in the flesh regarded it with distaste; and then, for some reason, quickly looked away.

‘What’s that about Paul Ferrars?’ she repeated.

‘He’s got a guest, my dear. Isn’t the guest a patient of yours, Doctor?’

‘No. He’s a patient of Tom’s,’ I said. ‘Tom confined him to a wheel-chair, and now he’s got a motor wheel-chair – latest type of thing – sent down from London.’

‘Merrivale, the fellow’s name is,’ explained Alec. ‘He’s a detective.’

Barry Sullivan poured himself a stiff whisky, added very little soda, and swallowed it.

‘That’s not true!’ cried Rita. ‘He’s from the War Office. Mrs Parker told me.’

‘He’s not an official detective, no. But he’s been tangled up in all kinds of murder cases. Fact!’ Alec nodded rapidly. ‘Thought we might get him started on his reminiscences. Something like that. Interesting stuff, probably. Always was interested in crime myself.’

Rita and young Sullivan exchanged a glance over Alec’s head. As clearly as though he had spoken, the boy’s look said: ‘Do we act tonight?’ and Rita’s glance, with the full strength of her nature egging him on, answered: ‘Yes.’ I confess, myself, to a touch of panic at that moment. Barry poured himself another whisky, added even less soda, and swallowed it; his eyes were scared but determined. Rita went over to smooth her husband’s scanty hair.

And Alec turned on the radio.

‘You have been listening to Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet,
adapted for broadcasting by Kenneth MacVane. The cast was as follows.’

The rain had momentarily ceased. Nothing could be heard in that sitting-room but the poised voice repeating a list of names. Emotions had been strung to so high a pitch that I nearly started out of my skin when the heavy, quivering gong-notes of Big Ben banged with tinny reverberation out of that loud-speaker, and slowly struck nine.

‘This is the BBC. Home Service. Here is the news, and this is Bruce Belfrage reading it.’

Alec, who had been sitting in a semi-stupor with his chin sunk on his chest, roused up. Edging his chair closer to the radio – its castors squeaked sharply – he bent his head forward for real attention.

‘Very slight enemy air activity was reported this afternoon when a single enemy reconnaissance plane flew over the –’

In a wing chair not far from me, Rita Wainright sat bolt upright, so straight that her back seemed to be arched. An empty glass trailed from the fingers of one hand. She saw nothing. Her eyes were smeary with tears, which suddenly overflowed and trickled down her cheeks; but she did not blink or make any move to wipe them away.

The black-out had made this room very hot. And Sullivan had been smoking cigarettes incessantly. The smoke lay in rifts round the golden lamps, getting into your throat and eyes. Rita moved a little. Beginning in her back, an uncontrollable trembling began to shake up through her whole body. She swallowed hard. The glass dropped from her fingers and fell softly on a rug; but she retrieved it by groping like a blind woman. Then, suddenly, she got to her feet.

‘Rita!’ said Barry Sullivan. ‘No!’

‘Yes,’ said Rita. ‘We agreed.’

Alec whipped round from the radio almost with a snarl.

‘
S-h-h
!’ he hissed at them, and instantly fell somnolent with his ear against the loud-speaker.

‘–
assured his audience that if France were ever again to assume her rightful place and prestige on the Continent
–’

Standing rigid, Rita turned her head and dabbed with the heel of her hand at her brimming eyes. It lifted the eyelid, giving a grotesque touch to her face as she moved her head from side to side. Becoming conscious of the glass in her hand, she blinked at it and spoke.

‘Get ice for drink,’ she muttered in a thick voice. Turning round, she marched into the dining-room. She might have been marching to a gallows, though of course any thought like that was nonsense. The noise of her shoe-heels clacked about the unruffled common-sense voice from the loudspeaker. The kitchen door squeaked, and then she had gone.

‘Colonel Lindbergh added that the United States, in his opinion, had no conceivable interest in any trans-Atlantic quarrels which –’

‘I’d better go and help her,’ said Barry Sullivan.

For the third time Alec twitched round, rolling up his eyes and pleading for silence.

The young man did not seem to hear him. Putting his own glass carefully on the table, Sullivan kept his face averted from me as he moved after Rita. But, as a consideration for Alec, he walked very softly. Even the kitchen door hardly creaked as he went through. There was a light under that door.

What I expected when those two reappeared, I am not sure I can tell. So strong can grow the power of suggestion, so poisoned can grow the nerves, that there would have been no surprise in hearing Rita invite Alec out to that homely kitchen, and the boy lurking near with something sharp in his hand. They surely wouldn’t attack Alec with a witness on the premises? But why not? Bywaters did it. Stoner did it. Both Rita and Sullivan were half drunk. What
does
a murderer look like, when he comes softly up behind his victim?

When those two came back …

But they did not come back.

The voice on that radio seemed to have been speaking for ever. I had heard all the items at six o’clock, and came to dread the length of each one when I recognized it. Alec, comatose except when he would nod his head at a telling point, never once stirred. Still the kitchen door did not creak; still there was no sound.

‘That is the end of the news. It is now eighteen and a half minutes past nine o’clock. At twenty minutes past you will hear …’

Alec switched off.

Rousing himself, he raised his head and peered across at me. He must have noticed my expression. An odd, sly little smile twisted round his lips.

‘My dear doctor,’ he observed gently, ‘did you think I didn’t know?’

‘Didn’t know what?’

Alec nodded in the direction of the kitchen.

‘How those two have been carrying on behind my back,’ he said.

The creepiest part of this was that it seemed to be the old Alec Wainright who spoke. The stocky little figure had relaxed. His expression was no longer so blurred. Humour, tolerance, had crept back into their house as his eyelid ceased to twitch; even his tone of voice and choice of words were subtly altered. Sitting back in the big chair, he folded his hands over his stomach.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, following my glance to the bottle on the table. ‘I’ve drunk myself into a peaceful state of mind. I’m even beginning to forget,’ he touched the radio, ‘this’.

‘And I’m to sit by and see you drink yourself to death to achieve peace of mind?’

‘That,’ he said cheerfully, ‘just about sums up the situation.’

He
was
the old Alec Wainright, except for a heightened colour and a protuberant vein in his temple.

‘Speaking of Rita …’ he went on.

‘How long have you known about her and young Sullivan?’

‘Oh, since the beginning.’

‘And what are you going to do about it?’

‘Well,’ said Alec, hunching his shoulders into the chair for a more comfortable position, ‘what would
you
do about it? Cut up a row and make myself look foolish? The cuckolded husband has always been a figure of fun. Don’t you know that?’

‘Then you don’t mind?’

Alec closed his eyes.

‘No,’ he answered reflectively, ‘I can’t say I do. Why should I mind? I’m past that sort of thing myself. I’m very fond of Rita, but not in that way. And I hate fuss. This isn’t the first time she’s fallen, you know.’

‘She swore to me in my office –’

‘Aha,’ said Alec, opening his eyes, ‘so she’s been talking to you?’ He laughed. ‘But then I can see why she wouldn’t tell. I’m rather proud of her prowess in that direction, to tell you the truth. No. Barry Sullivan’s a nice lad. She might go farther and fare worse. No. I’ve found it much better to pretend I don’t notice anything.’

‘You think that’s better?’

‘It’s the least I can do for her.’

‘Have you any idea how those two are taking this?’

‘Oh, they’ll stew a little.’

‘Stew a little? Then you haven’t realized I’ve been sitting here all evening on something a good deal worse than pins and needles, wondering whether they were planning to kill you?’