Death at the Opera

of view, but she was all over him until Calma came along. Then somehow he got to know that Calma was my heir, and that did it, I suppose, for I can’t conceive of any man being attracted to Calma for her looks, can you?”

“I never met her,” said Mrs. Bradley gently. The situation was becoming complicated. She resolved to try whether Helm could not straighten it out.

On the following day, therefore, having rung up Noel Wells and requested him to be at his post of vantage behind the breakwater, she walked along the sands until she came upon Helm’s bungalow. Helm was on the seaward side of his garden, if garden it could be called, engaged in planning a rockery. Mrs. Bradley was so delighted that she stood at his elbow and watched the proceedings for six minutes by her watch before he turned and caught sight of her. An unpleasant change came over his face. His eyes glinted dangerously like those of a treacherous dog, and his canines showed white, like fangs, at the corners of his mouth as his top lip drew back in a snarl which he quickly changed into a smile.

“Ah, digging a grave, I see,” said Mrs. Bradley, in the bright and fatuous manner which she had adopted for his undoing. Helm looked startled.

“A grave, dear lady?” he said, gazing at the heap of large pebbles, small boulders, and pieces of quartz and granite which lay at his feet and which he was busily arranging.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley, who was enjoying herself to the full. “All murderers make a rockery over the grave of the victim. Didn’t you know? The police know it, too. Don’t you read the Sunday papers, dear child! The first task undertaken by the police in any case of suspected murder is to dig up the rockery and take up the crazy paving in the sunk-garden. After that they explore the cellars, and, if all else fails, they go through the left luggage at the nearest railway station.”

Helm managed a sickly smile.

“You came to ask for more information about the school, of course,” he said. “Come inside, will you?”

“On no account,” said Mrs. Bradley, cackling gleefully. “You terrify me! Yes, terrify me!” She so emphasized the middle word each time that it certainly sounded bloodcurdling in the extreme. She gripped his arm between her powerful thumb and skinny first finger, so that he winced with pain and tried to draw away, but she held him fast, wagged the forefinger of the other hand in his shrinking face and, dropping her voice, said in sepulchral tones: “And do you know what they are saying about you in Bognor?”

“Yes,” said Helm. Mrs. Bradley looked shocked, a histrionic effort which did her great credit, since some twenty-eight years previously she had given up being shocked at the many foibles of humanity.

“You do?” she said in tones which blended horror with incredulity. Helm nodded. He was recovering. Mrs. Bradley released his arm.

“And is it true?” she asked, in breathless accents. Helm managed a shaking laugh. Against his will, and, as he supposed, against his instinctive flair for picking out a fool, the little old woman was beginning to get on his nerves.

“It’s true that I was tried for my life,” he admitted. “But it’s a shame and a scandal that people should gossip about me.”

“And you really are the notorious Cutler?” said Mrs. Bradley. “How absolutely divinely thrilling! How I should love to have been at the trial!”

She did it well; so well that Helm’s relief showed plainly in his face. His crafty eyes resumed their expression of frank good-nature and his wolf-teeth disappeared. She was a fool, after all. He need never have been alarmed. He must be losing his nerve. She was easy. Ten thousand pounds!

“Dear lady,” he said, “what an extraordinary desire in one so gently nurtured and so extremely well-endowed with all the feminine graces!”

Mrs. Bradley, who could throw a knife into the centre of any given target at a range of thirty feet, and could break a man’s wrist with a twist of her claw-like fingers smiled amiably. Noel Wells, peering cautiously over the breakwater, saw her and Helm engaged in apparently amicable conversation, and dropped back out of sight again.

“I’ve really come to ask your advice about my son,” said Mrs. Bradley, “and now I know that you are quite a man of the world, I shall follow out your suggestions with the greater confidence. He has become entangled with a female against my wishes.”

“Disinherit him,” said Helm immediately. He had all the blind vanity and egoism of the man to whom murder is neither an art nor a necessity. It was going to be too easy, he decided. Once get this nincompoop of a son disinherited—why it was as easy as walking on the sands at low tide! He began to smile joyfully. Mrs. Bradley smiled too; hers was the thin, cruel smile of the tiger. Had Helm been one iota less full of self-conceit and villainy, he must have seen the small sharp teeth behind those thin, stretched, smiling lips.

“Disinherit him?” she said. “Well, I could threaten him with that, anyway, couldn’t I?”

“I should give him a real scare, if I were you,” said Helm. “He gets your life assurance when you die, I take it?”

“Oh, you dreadful man! Don’t talk like that, so casually, of dying!” said Mrs. Bradley, giving him a playful push. “I’m not going to die for years! A fortuneteller told me so.”

“No, no! But to scare him into doing as you wish, why not pretend to make that life assurance payable to someone else?”

“Yes, but to whom?” said Mrs. Bradley, as though she were inclined to favour the absurd suggestion.

“That’s not for me to say,” said Helm, apprehensive of going too far, and scaring the quarry. Having brought matters to this promising point, it would be a thousand pities to be too precipitate, he thought. Besides, he wasn’t in a hurry. He had other plans which were on the point of maturing. It would not hurt to let the old girl hang up for a bit, while he carried out his other schemes. Besides, the son was a bit of an obstacle. He did not want some great goop of a boy asking a lot of silly questions, and perhaps becoming violent. Mr. Helm, ne Cutler, detested violence. Drowning an unsuspecting woman in a bath was one thing, but standing up to an angry young man was quite another.

“I should like to meet your son,” he said.