Till Death Do Us Part

'That,' Dr Fell pointed out, 'appears to have been his speciality.'

More and more was a strengthening sanity emerging, to explain away all difficulties. Dick spoke with fervour.

'As soon as the constable comes back, and I can be let off standing guard, there's just one thing I want to do. I want to go straight to Lesley and apologize.'

Dr Fell was delighted.

'Apologize,' he inquired, 'for shielding her?'

'Apologize for everything! Tell her what a swine I am! Have the whole thing out with her!'

'If you want to go now,' said Dr Fell, 'I can stand guard. It will interest me very much to make an examination of that room. Later, if you please, I want you to tell me EVERYTHING. I have a feeling' - he groped at the air -'that my present information is not only incomplete, but misleading. When you return, by the way, you will probably find me at Ashe Hall.'

'At Ashe Hall? Do you know Lord Ashe?'

Dr Fell pointed with his cane.

'Those, I take it, are the grounds of the Hall?'

'Yes. You can go through the coppice up over a field, and get to it by a short cut.'

'I am acquainted with Lord Ashe,' resumed Dr Fell, 'only through correspondence. But his antiquarian researches interest me. The first Ashe was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. The last Ashe, before this present one, was a sizzler who upset half Europe with the most notorious bawd of her day. Between those two he plans a family history which shall be, in actual fact, a history of England for three and a half centuries. If he had enough money to ...' Dr Fell woke up.' Never mind! Shall I stand guard for you, sir?'

Middlesworth touched Dick's arm.

'Come along,' he said, 'and I'll give you a lift. I've got to be back myself for surgery at half-past ten.'

Utterly oblivious of them now, Dr Fell lumbered up the two stone steps into the cottage. In the last glimpse they had of him, as Middlesworth backed the car round in the lane, they could see him inside the sitting-room. They could see him first owlishly examining the shattered window on the left, and then examining the other window with its bullet-hole below and to one side of the metal catch.

Dick rode in Middlesworth's car with very different feelings from last night. While they bumped along Gallows Lane - it was no very great distance from here to the High Street, and to Lesley's house - each of them made only one remark. Dick said, 'Thanks!' and Middlesworth said, 'Not at all.' But it was as though they had shaken hands.

When Middlesworth dropped him off in front of Lesley's house, Dick stood for a time looking north along the sedate High Street. The daze of the nightmare had not quite passed, but he wanted to execute a dance, or throw a stone through the post office window, as a sheer explosion of relief. He took pleasure, physical pleasure, even in the sight of the High Street.

There were the familiar houses. There was the post office, with its temperamental postmistress and no stamp-machine. There were the shops, the public-house 'Griffin and Ash-tree', the three or four offices, the trim brick premises of the City and Provincial Bank. Beyond rose-the low grey spire of the church, presided over by the Rev. Arthur Goodflower; and its clock was now striking the quarter-hour after ten.

The clock-note had a melody not noticeable to anybody except Dick Markham. He strode up the path towards Lesley's house.

Nobody answered his ring at the door-bell. He rang again, still without effect, before he noticed that the front door was not quite closed.

Pushing it open, he put his head into the cool, dusky, pleasant hall.

'Lesley!' he called.

How the devil was he going to face up to her now? How to tell her, in so many words, that he had last night suspected her of being an angelic murderess with poison, or a diary, or some unnamed horror hidden away in a wall-safe? But the only thing to do was to tell her straight out, ending this nightmare in one gust of laughter.

For the fact remained that yesterday's business with the rifle had been an accident after all.

Lesley, rattled by some weird story - for all Dick knew, maybe even that he was a murderer himself - had loosed off that rifle without meaning it. And the fraudulent Gilman had instantly and glibly used this to his own advantage.

Still no reply from the house.

'Lesley!' he called again.

The grandfather clock in the hall ticked with its metronome-note. Mrs Rackley, in all probability, would be out marketing at this hour. But Lesley - He was about to turn away, and close the door after him, when he caught sight of Lesley's handbag, with her front-door key beside it, lying on a small table in the hall.

Shouting her name, he wandered into the sitting-room. Then he glanced into the dining-room opposite, and investigated the kitchen behind that. One look through the back kitchen-windows told him that she was not in the garden either.

He told himself that he had no reason to feel disquiet. She might only have gone a step or two down the road. Standing in the middle of the tidy white kitchen, where a tap drizzled with hollow effect in the silence, he told himself this; but he had now reached such a state of mind that he wanted the reassurance of merely seeing her.

As a last resort he peered into the little room, hardly more than a cubicle, where Lesley was accustomed to have breakfast Its furniture was of bright-painted blue and white wood, like nursery furniture. On the table, set for one with precise array of silver and china, the bacon and eggs had turned stone cold. The toast had withered to hardness in its rack. No coffee had been poured out into a waiting cup.

Dick hurried out of that room, returned to the hall again, and started upstairs three steps at a time.

So thoroughly were the proprieties observed in this house that he had never so much as looked inside her bedroom, though he knew which room it was. He halted outside the closed door. He knocked once without reply, hesitated, and opened the door.

The two windows of the bedroom faced the High Street. Between them showed, like a scar, an, evilly significant wall-safe with its steel front swung wide open. That was not all he could see, when three strides took him forward. The inside of the safe, not much bigger than a large biscuit-barrel, was empty.

Passing the foot of the bed, Dick swung round.

Huddled on the floor near the foot of the bed, her left cheek against the carpet, lay Cynthia Drew. One knee was partly drawn up, and Cynthia's arms in the pinkish-coloured jumper were thrown wide. A purplish bruise on her right temple had split a little to let dark blood trickle and congeal down the cheekbone. She did not move.

CHAPTER 12

AN empty safe.

Cynthia, waxen of complexion and with her yellow hair disarranged.

Dick picked her up - Cynthia's sturdiness made her no light weight, despite the fact that she was not tall - and carried her to the bed, where she lay as limply as a doll.

There could be no question, thank God, about her being alive. She was not even, he hoped, seriously hurt. Her half-parted lips stirred to an audible if jerky breathing. But she was pale, and the devil's brush of the bruise showed ugly against the very fair skin.

Another door opposite the windows displayed a thoroughly modern, even sybaritic bathroom. Dick plunged into it, turned on the cold-water tap with a rush into the washbasin, soaked a face-cloth, wrung it out, and rummaged in the medicine-chest for smelling-salts and iodine. In doing so he confronted his own reflexion - stubbly-bearded, not even washed, a spectre to affright decent people - in the mirror over the wash-basin. He found neither smelling-salts nor iodine, but there was a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a box of cotton-wool.

He went back to Cynthia, and he was just pressing the wet cloth to her forehead when he heard, from downstairs, the hollow slam of the front door.

Lesley?

But it was not Lesley. When he hurried downstairs, taking them at mountaineering jumps, it was to find Mrs Rackley: in a regrettable hat, with a market-basket over one arm and a bulging paper carrier in the other hand.