When Last I Died

preference was usually for a more leisurely progress.

Muriel would probably come by train, and, at the earliest, could scarcely arrive at the haunted house before eight, for the railway journey was across country, and involved three changes. The connections, too, at the exchange stations were poor. Mrs. Bradley did not expect her to approach the house before dusk, even if she got to the village earlier than that.

It was dark, however, before Muriel came, and Mrs. Bradley had to retire to her vantage point, the attic cupboard in which she believed Cousin Tom used to lock up the boys when they were not wanted in the cellar.

At about half-past ten she heard the slam of the front door. She had heard no footsteps on the path, and no sound of a latch-key in the door. She listened intently, but Muriel must have gone straight into one of the downstair rooms, or remained in the hall, for she could not hear her walking about or mounting the stairs.

She had put away her knitting and had taken out of the capacious pocket of her skirt a small harmonica. Quietly she pushed back the door of the attic cupboard, and played a few soft notes.

Like faery music, they seemed to float all over the empty house. She stopped, and listened again. Nothing was to be heard for a full minute, and then a sound of footsteps below caused her to put the instrument again to her beaky little mouth and play another series of disconnected notes.

This time Muriel's reaction was more definite. She began to run up the stairs, and as she ran she called out :

'Are you there, Mrs. Bradley? Are you there?'

For answer, Mrs. Bradley blew a long discordant confusion of notes from the harmonica, a pre-arranged signal for her friends, the inspector and the sergeant, who had been in hiding in the scullery. Taking their cue, the police officers began to hurl furniture and pots and pans out of the kitchen into the hall.

Muriel ceased to run upstairs. She gave a strange, loud yelp of terror, and then shouted :

'Mrs. Bradley! Please don't do it! I'm frightened. And, listen! I want to speak to you.'

Mrs. Bradley waited until the din below had ceased, and then blew on the harmonica again. The noises broke out worse than before; upon this, and, under cover of the really appalling sounds, she raced down the back staircase and then slipped out through the scullery as soon as it was safe to negotiate the array of furniture which was now piled up outside the kitchen.

She made her way to the front of the house, walking briskly on the gravel path, and opened the front door of the now almost eerily silent building. At that, Muriel came flying down the stairs to meet her.

'Oh!' she cried. 'I'm glad to see you! Oh, I'm thankful to see you! This house! It's come awake at last!'

'Whatever do you mean?' asked Mrs. Bradley. Muriel did not answer until she had groped for and discovered the main switch. Then she put on the lights and both of them looked at the wreckage.

' Not the poltergeist?' said Mrs. Bradley incredulously.

' Unless it's someone playing the fool,' said Muriel with weak annoyance.

'Bound to be,' said Mrs. Bradley reassuringly. 'If we look about we're almost bound to find them, unless they've cleared off by now, which I rather suspect they would do if they've been here on mischief bent.'

'But they couldn't have known I was coming. I didn't even tell you I was coming. It was just—just a sudden fancy to see the place again. Of course, I'd never have dared to come alone, but as you said you would be here....'

How well she did it, thought Mrs. Bradley, dispassionately interested in such a convincing display of protective colouring; how extraordinarily well, the nervous, over-strained, weak and clinging little ... murderess. Her voice hardened.

'Yes, but I'm here with work to do. I don't require, or particularly desire, company.'

'Oh, you won't mind me. I shan't interfere,' said Muriel. 'I expect, as you say, it was someone thinking to scare us. Ah, well, it all seems quiet enough now. But, you know, when I first heard that mouth-organ thing which seemed to come from the top of the house, I really thought for a minute that it was—that it was the fairies, or something.'

'Oh, no,' said Mrs. Bradley, 'you did not. You thought it was those poor ...' She watched the razor coming slowly round from behind the murderess's back, and suddenly cried, 'What's that?'

She cried it out so loudly that her voice rang through the house. At the same instant a shrill whistle came from the direction of the scullery, and, as Muriel's face grew pale, a sound stranger and more eerie than any that had so far been heard that night seemed to come from the courtyard outside. Part of it was homely enough—the steady clop, clop of a heavy horse, the sound of the hoofs muffled by the courtyard weeds—but, mingled with this was another sound, unusual to most men's ears, but apparently familiar, in some horrid and personal sense, to the wretched, guilty woman who had now dropped the razor on the floor.

'The cover of the well! They're here! They're here! They've come to be revenged on me! Go away! Go away! Go away! Leave me alone, you little fiends!' she shrieked at the top of her voice.

The sounds ceased. Mrs. Bradley picked up the razor.

'I think you dropped this,' she said.

'I?' faltered Muriel, recoiling. 'I don't know what it is! I never saw it! Didn't you hear what I heard?'

'I only heard someone screwing down a coffin lid,' said Mrs. Bradley, quietly as before. 'Or could it have been the trapdoor down to the cellar? Listen! Do you hear it too?'

She half-turned, and at that instant Muriel opened the razor and made a sudden slashing attack. Mrs. Bradley, who had been waiting to do so, side-stepped, and banged her on the elbow with a cosh which she had drawn from the deep pocket of her skirt when she had half-turned away.

'Listen!' she said again.

Muriel was moaning with the agony of the blow on the elbow, but her moans of pain changed suddenly to a dreadful cry of terror. From beneath their feet came the sound of someone digging. She was in a state of hysterical panic when the inspector stepped out of the kitchen to make the arrest. She made a full and babbled confession on the way to the station.

Chapter Eleven

THE DIARY

'Hark, now everything is still, The screech-owl and the whistler shrill, Call upon our dame aloud, And bid her quickly don her shroud!'

WEBSTER.

'THE thing is,' said Ferdinand,' when did you first suspect her, mother?'

'I don't know,' replied Mrs. Bradley.

'Genius,' said Caroline, without (her mother-in-law thought) much justification for the compliment.

'I thought you were convinced of Bella's guilt.'

'I was.'

'Well, then, you must know when your ideas changed.'

Mrs. Bradley was silent for a minute or two. One would have said that she was in contemplation of the hedge which divided part of her garden from the paddock. 'I don't know,' she repeated, 'but if I am being asked to hazard an opinion, I would say that I was convinced of Bella's guilt until I went to see her down in Devon.'

Ferdinand nodded, as his mother turned her basilisk eyes on him.

'Personally,' he said, 'I did not think anything could disprove Bella Foxley's guilt. The ancient, wealthy aunt, the blackmailing cousin, the dangerous and criminally minded boys, and the golden opportunity of making herself safe for life by assuming the identity of a murdered sister—the thing seemed self- evident, fool-proof, satisfactory and horrible.'

'But it wasn't altogether satisfactory,' said Mrs. Bradley, 'as I realized the moment I began to examine it from Bella Foxley's point of view. If you assume for a moment that Bella was not guilty, you get a different impression entirely of the course events may have taken. You get the impression, for instance, that every ill deed we had attributed to Bella could just as well have been performed by Muriel.'

'That means, though, that the aunt died accidentally,' said Ferdinand. 'Bella was the only person to have had a motive there for murder.'

'Not necessarily,' replied his mother. 'Bella certainly had the motive, for she stood to gain by the death, but if she could be blackmailed successfully, Tom and Muriel stood to gain something too. It was a clever plot, but it was apparent, before I suspected Muriel at all, that Tom was somewhere involved. It was evident that Bella had not written that diary.'

'The diary?'

'Yes. You've read it. You know what the mistakes and discrepancies were. Some of the mistakes could, but others could not, have been made by a single author, especially if that author were Bella. Collaboration was indicated—an unheard-of thing in a genuine diary.'

'I see what you mean. But there was no way of telling which part was Bella's own work, was there? And, even if there were, the only other part-author of the diary, as you say, could have been Tom. At least, let's put it that the collaborator couldn't have been Muriel.'

'There was no need for it to have been Muriel. I spoke just now of a plot. But, to revert to the diary itself, it seemed to me to indicate that the writer had a rather pleasing style, and a definite, although possibly rudimentary, sense of form. Of course, we must admit that Bella may have possessed both these literary qualities, but Tom, as a practising writer (he made some of his income out of articles for journals devoted to psychical research, you will remember), was the more likely author, on the whole, in my opinion. Still, one cannot generalise about such things, for it is a well-known fact that people whose powers of