The Fingerprint (3 page)

IT WAS an agreeable week-end. Frank and Anthony walked over to Abbottsleigh in the afternoon, and went on to have tea with Grant and Cicely Hathaway, after which Anthony returned to Field End and Frank Abbott went on to town by train from Lenton. The infamous Cressington case broke next day, and he became too much occupied with it to have time or thought for anything else until, as suddenly and dreadfully as it had begun, it ended and the Yard could breathe again. Chief Inspector Lamb lost a stone in weight, a fact which he resented though he could do very well without it. What annoyed him more was that he had lost his sleep, a thing so unusual as to have the most unhappy effect upon his temper. Frank emerged from the affair with a good deal of kudos and the knowledge that he had probably been as near to death as he ever would be until he actually died.

It is curious to reflect that whereas on the stage an actor is within the limits of his own play and is always aware of what kind of play it is—comedy, tragedy, melodrama, or farce—in real life he has no such knowledge and finds himself sliding from one play to another, with the players continually changing, the cues uncertain, and the plot extremely difficult to follow. After a pleasant preliminary scene at Field End in what appeared to be drawing-room comedy the Cressington case was stark melodrama. Frank had left one theatre and been hurried on to the boards in another. But the Field End play went on without him.

Maggie Bell comes into the story at this point. She had been a cripple ever since a car knocked her down in Deeping village street just before her twelfth birthday. She was now a year or two over thirty, and she had not grown or developed very much since what she always spoke of with some pride as “my accident.” She could not set her foot to the ground, and she never went out. But that was not to say that she did not know all about everything that went on in Deeping and its surroundings. Her main sources of information were three. She lay all day on a couch drawn up to the window in the front room over Mr. Bisset’s Grocery Stores, the name imposed by its owner, an ambitious little man, upon what had started life as a general shop. In addition to the Groceries of the title Mr. Bisset sold overalls, strong boots, lads’ and men’s, vegetables and fruit in season, jams and preserves concocted by Mrs. Bisset, together with the liquorice bootlaces once popular but now extinct in most parts of England. Mrs. Bisset produced them from a recipe of which she boasted that it had come down in her family for two hundred years and during that time had never been imparted to anyone who was not a blood relation. On the days when she was concocting this delicacy the smell would penetrate not only to the two rooms rented by Mrs. Bell, but would pervade the village street for some fifty yards in either direction, which, as Mrs. Bisset remarked, was as good an advertisement as you could have.

Sooner or later everyone shopped at the Grocery Stores, even what Mrs. Bell called the County, since it may happen, to anyone to run out of hairpins, safety pins, knicker elastic, to say nothing of apples, onions, tomatoes, or one of the practically universal breakfast cereals. Whenever it was possible to have her window open Maggie could hear everything that was said on the pavement below, where people would stand and gossip as they came and went. She had the sharpest ears in the county and was proud of the fact. On a fine day she would look out and wave, and nearly everyone would wave back. Mrs. Abbott from Abbottsleigh always did. She would look up and smile ever so nicely. But Miss Cicely, that was Mrs. Grant Hathaway now, she would come running up the stairs with that little Bramble dog of hers and half a dozen magazines and books for Maggie to pass the time with. Clever that Bramble dog was. What they call a dachshund—long body and short legs and ever such a knowing look in his eye. Went with Miss Cicely everywhere, and she’d talk to him just as if he could understand every word.

Maggie’s second source of information came from the fact that her mother took in dressmaking. Clever at it too, and needed to be since it was all she and Maggie had to live on except what came from the accident money. Very smart ladies used to bring her things to copy or to be altered. Mrs. Abbott had brought her in old Lady Evelyn Abbott’s wedding dress to make over for Miss Cicely when she was married. It was the loveliest stuff that Maggie had ever seen in her life —pounds and pounds a yard it must have cost. And wasted on a little brown thing like Miss Cicely—only of course that wasn’t a thing she would say except to her mother, and when she said it to her Mrs. Bell right down snapped her nose off.

The third and most important means by which Maggie kept in touch with everything that went on lay, quite literally, to her hand. It was the telephone. She had it on a long flex so that it could stand on the table by her sofa all day and be moved to beside her bed in the evening. It is not to be supposed that there were many people to ring her up, or that Mrs. Bell could afford any but the most necessary outgoing calls. There were of course appointments for fittings, and enquiries as to the progress of work in hand, but the strength of Maggie’s position lay in the fact that Deeping was furnished with that valuable aid to knowledge, a party line. When the Eternity Ring case was holding the neighbourhood in a state of horrified suspense Maggie had been able to follow the proceedings from the first mysterious call for Mr. Grant Hathaway by a strange woman with a French accent, through two murders and Mr. Hathaway’s impending arrest, down to the final and most startling climax.

She had naturally been a good deal interested in the dance. A good many of the guests had had new dresses for it, but some of the ladies came for alterations to what they already had, Lady Pondesbury for one. You’d think she’d be sick, sore and weary of that old black satin of hers, but in she’d come time after time, and always the same story, somehow or other it had got to be let out. Any money they had went on horses—and why not if they liked it that way? Mrs. Abbott, she had brought in her black lace, and a nice dress it was and didn’t need very much done to it—just a little bringing up to date as you might say. Miss Georgina had had a new dress, a lovely silver one. Maggie would have liked to see her in it. She did hear Miss Mirrie Field talking about it on the telephone. The day before the dance it was. She put through a London call, and it was a man she was talking to, telling him all about the party and how excited she was. She said her uncle had given her a cheque and told her to get a real nice dress, and she had, but it wasn’t as grand as Georgina’s— “Hers is silver and ever so becoming, and mine is white with a lot of little frills. Don’t you wish you could see me in it?” And he said, “Perhaps I shall,” and Miss Mirrie said, “Oh no, you mustn’t do anything silly.” And he said, “I’ve dropped you a line. And you remember what I told you about my letters?” Miss Mirrie said oh, yes, she did, and the man said, “Well, you go on remembering it, or you’ll be finding yourself out on your ear!” and he rang off. Not at all a refined way to talk, Maggie thought. She was surprised at Miss Mirrie putting up with it. She had kept a sharp lookout to see if there were any more of those calls, but if there were she missed them.

The dance was over and there was just the usual amount of ringing up about it afterwards and saying how much they had enjoyed it, but nothing out of the way interesting. Not that week.

It was on the Monday morning a week later that Georgina Grey received her first anonymous letter. It lay beside her plate on the breakfast table, and since she was the first to come down she was alone in the room when she opened it. When she thought about this afterwards she was grateful. She stood there tall and fair in a grey skirt and a twin set of primrose wool, and for a moment she just didn’t accept what was happening. She had torn open a cheap flimsy envelope and dropped it on to the table. She held a cheap flimsy bit of paper in her hand. It had lines on it. In spite of the lines the writing was very bad. She got as far as that, and then her mind seemed to stick. There were words on the paper, but it didn’t seem as if she could take them in. Her mind shut itself against them, and quite without conscious thought she turned the sheet over to look for the signature, but the writing went on right down to the foot of the page, and then it just left off. There wasn’t any signature.

She turned it over again and began to read from where it seemed to begin at the top of the page. There wasn’t an address, and there wasn’t a date. There wasn’t properly speaking any beginning at all. It just started.

“You think pretty well of yourself, don’t you, Miss Georgina Grey? You’ve been brought up soft, and I suppose you think you’ll go on living soft to the end of the chapter. You won’t. You’ve got things coming to you that you’re not going to like. Some of those who are underneath now will be on top, and you will be underneath. When you have never had anything to speak of you don’t miss it so much, but when you have always had everything and then quite suddenly you don’t have anything at all you miss it like hell. Up with the rocket and down with the stick, that’s you. I suppose you think people don’t see how you treat your cousin—looking down your nose at her and being patronizing, and giving her your cast-off clothes. You needn’t think it doesn’t get talked about, or that there aren’t quite a lot of people who are getting up to boiling-point about it. And all because you want everything for yourself and because she is prettier than you are and with much more taking ways, and because A.H. and others have begun to think so. And that hits you where it hurts, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, there will be lots more coming! People don’t like to see a girl spiting another girl and trying to push her down just because she is younger and prettier, and because you think J.F. is getting too fond of her as well as A.H.”

Georgina read it right through to the end. Then she put it back into the envelope. Her first feeling was one of bewilderment. You heard about anonymous letters, but you didn’t get them. They were like a lot of things which you read about in the papers. They happened to other people. They didn’t happen to you. It took her a little time to assimilate the fact that this was happening to her. It was as unexpected and as unbelievable as if she had been slapped in the face in the street by a stranger. She had to go on from there to wondering why anyone should do such a thing, and to the further question of who could have done it. Who could possibly have written her a letter like that? It must be someone who knew about her and about Mirrie, but she couldn’t think of anyone who would do such a thing. She stood there by the breakfast table with the cheap envelope in her hand and felt as if she had missed a step in the dark.

When she heard voices in the hall she went out quickly by way of the service-door and up the back stairs to her room, where she put the letter into a drawer. After which she came down again to find Mirrie and Anthony in the dining-room. They were standing very close together. No, she wouldn’t allow that into her thought—it was Mirrie who was standing very close to Anthony. It was just a way she had of coming right up to anyone—to him, or to Johnny, or to Jonathan Field—to stand like that with her head tilted, stroking a coat-sleeve and looking up. It was an artless, unconscious trick and very engaging, but just at this moment Georgina could have done without it.

Anthony turned to meet her, and Mirrie sparkled and said,

“It’s a lovely morning. And Anthony’s going to show me a place in a wood where a badger lives, only he says we shan’t see him, because he only comes out at night. Why do you suppose he does that? I should hate to go out in the dark alone— wouldn’t you?”

“But then you’re not a badger,” said Anthony in a teasing voice.

After breakfast Georgina took the anonymous letter to Jonathan Field in the study. He looked up with an air of impatience as she came to stand by the writing-table and put the envelope down in front of him.

“This came by the morning post. I thought I had better show it to you.”

When he spoke, the impatience was in his voice.

“What is it?”

“It’s an anonymous letter.”

“An anonymous—what nonsense!”

“I thought you had better see it.”

He picked the envelope up, his brows drawn very close and black above his deep-set eyes. He got the letter out, frowned even more darkly, and read it through. When he had come to the end he turned back and read it a second time. Then, glancing up, he said sharply,

“Any idea who wrote it?”

“Absolutely none.”

He dropped it on the blotting-pad.

“Cheap paper, bad writing. What’s it all about?”

“I don’t know.”

He leaned back, swinging his chair round so that he faced her.

“A cheap, nasty letter. But why was it written?”

She said again, “I don’t know.”

His voice was suddenly sharp.

“It means there’s been talk! About Mirrie and about you! People have been talking! Why? Something must have been going on to make this talk about you! Why haven’t I been told?”

“There wasn’t anything to tell.”

He brought his hand down hard upon the letter.

“There’s no smoke without some fire! No one writes a letter like this unless there’s been talk! Talk and feeling! If you weren’t getting on with Mirrie you ought to have told me! You might know she wouldn’t say anything. She is always thinking about what she can do to please you. I suppose that ought to have opened my eyes. I can’t think why it didn’t. She hasn’t ever felt secure—she hasn’t felt sure of herself or of you.”

Georgina went back a step.

“Uncle Jonathan!”

“I thought you would be glad to have her here—as glad as I was. She is so grateful for everything—so anxious to please. I can’t understand why you should have taken this prejudice.”

“Why do you say that I have taken a prejudice?”

He had always been quick to anger, but not against her. She was not afraid, but she felt herself vulnerable. The whole thing was so sudden, so much a denial of what their relationship had always been. His hand beat on the table and on the letter that lay there.

“I don’t understand this about the clothes—giving her old things to wear. It would be very humiliating—very humiliating indeed. For her—and for me, since it seems it has been noticed. I can’t think how you came to do such a thing!”