search of the house and the garden took three-quarters of an hour, by the end of which Dame Lettie was in no condition to deal with her maid’s hysterics. After a week of this routine Gwen had declared the house to be haunted and Dame Lettie to be a maniac, and had left.
Thus, Dame Lettie was not in the mood for the geriatrics when she visited Miss Taylor in the Maud Long Ward.
‘I suppose,’ ventured Miss Taylor, ‘you have informed the police of your suspicions. If someone is trying to get into the house, surely the police —’
‘The police,’ Dame Lettie explained with long-tried emphasis, ‘are shielding Mortimer and his accomplices. The police always stick together. Eric is in with them. They are all in it together.’
‘Perhaps a little rest in a country nursing home would do you good. All this must be very exhausting.’
‘Not me,’ said Dame Lettie. ‘Oh no, Taylor, no nursing home for me while I have my faculties and am able to get about on my feet. I am looking for another maid. An older woman. They are so difficult to come by, they all want their television.’ She looked over to the senile patients gathered round their television receiver. ‘Such an expense to the Country. An abominable invention.’
‘Really, in cases like theirs, it is an entirely suitable invention. It does hold their attention.’
‘Taylor, I cannot come here again. It is too distressing.’
‘Go away for a holiday, Dame Lettie. Forget about the house and the phone calls.’
‘Even the private detective whom I employed is in league with Mortimer. Mortimer is behind it all. Eric is…’
Miss Taylor dabbed her sore eye under her glasses. She wanted to close her eyes, and longed for the bell to ring which marked the end of the visiting hour.
‘Mortimer … Mortimer … Eric,’ Dame Lettie was going on. Miss Taylor felt reckless.
‘In my belief,’ she said, ‘the author of the anonymous telephone calls is Death himself, as you might say. I don’t see, Dame Lettie, what you can do about it. If you don’t remember Death, Death reminds you to do so. And if you can’t cope with the facts the next best thing is to go away for a holiday.’
‘You have taken leave of your senses, Taylor,’ said Dame Lettie, ‘and I can do no more for you.’ She stopped at the outer office and, demanding to speak to the ward sister, registered her opinion that Miss Taylor was off her head and should be watched.
When Gwen had left Dame Lettie’s employment she quite understandably told her boy friend all about the nightly goings-on, how the mad Dame would go round the house, poking into all the cupboards and corners, and the garden, poking into the shrubberies with an electric torch, no wonder her eyesight was failing.
‘And she wouldn’t let me tell the police,’ said Gwen. ‘She doesn’t trust the police. No wonder, they’d have laughed at her. Oh, but it gave me the creeps because when you’re looking for noises, you keep hearing them all over the house and you think you see shapes in the darkness, and half the time it was herself I bumped into in the garden. Oh, but that house is just about haunted. I couldn’t stand it a minute longer.’
Gwen’s boy friend thought it a good story and recounted it at his work which was in a builder’s yard.
‘My girl was in with an old girl, some dame or countess or other up Hampstead way … went round the place every night … kept hearing burglars … wouldn’t get the police … My girl walked out on her a week past, too much of it …’
‘There’s some cranky ones going about,’ commented one of his friends, ‘I’ll tell you. I remember during the war when I was batman to a colonel, he …’
So it was that a labourer, new to the yard, picked up Gwen’s story —a youth who would not have considered himself a criminal type, but who knew a window cleaner who would give two or perhaps three pounds an item for likely information. But you had to have an address.
‘Where’d you say this countess was living?’ he said to Gwen’s boy. ‘I know all up Hampstead and round the Heath.’
Gwen’s boy said, ‘Oh, this is a posh part, Hackleton Rise. My girl says the old woman’ll be carted off looney in the end. She’s one of them, did you see in the papers? — about the phone-call hoax. She’s cut off her phone now …
The young labourer took his information to the window cleaner, who did not pay him immediately. ‘I got to check the address with my contact.
The window cleaner himself never actually touched a job like this, but there was money in information. In a few days’ time his contact expressed himself satisfied, and paid over ten pounds, remarking that the old girl in question wasn’t a countess after all. The window cleaner duly paid a small share to the young labourer remarking that the information was a bit faulty, and that he’d better not be leaky with his mouth the next few days.
So it came about that Dame Lettie’s house and nocturnal searchings fell under scrutiny.
On the day of her last visit to Miss Taylor she returned to Hampstead by taxi shortly after five. She called in at the employment agency to see if they had found her a woman yet, a middle-aged woman, clean with good references, to live in. No, they had found no one yet, Dame Lettie, but they were keeping their eyes open. She walked the rest of the way home.
Gloomily she made a pot of tea and drank a cup standing in the kitchen. She then puffed her way into her study and started writing a letter to Eric. Her fountain-pen ran out of ink. She refilled it and continued,
. . . I am thinking only of your poor mother put away in a home, & your poor old father who has done so much for you, and who is rapidly failing in health, when I demand that at least you should write and explain your silence. There has been bitterness between your parents and yourself, I know. But the time is come, surely, in their declining years, for you to make what amends you can. Your father was telling me only the other day, that, for his part, he is willing to let bygones be bygones. In fact, he asked me to write to you in this vein.
She stopped and looked out of the window. An unfamiliar car had pulled up at the house opposite. Someone visiting the Dillingers, apparently, not knowing the Dillingers were away. She began to feel chilly and got up to draw the curtain. A man was sitting waiting in the car. As she drew the curtains, he drove off. She returned to her desk and continued,
Do not suppose I am not aware of your activities in London and your attempts to frighten me. Do not suppose I am in the least alarmed.
She scored these last sentences through with her pen. That was not what she had meant to write. She had, at first, thought of writing in this manner, but her second thoughts, she now recalled, had decided her to write something more in the nature of
