And then, inside the post office, somebody fired a shot There is somewhere a nightmare story of two lovers for ever condemned to push through the revolving doors of the same hotel. Something of the same quality, a sense of doors revolving only to shut him in again with the same nightmare scene, welled up in Dick Markham's heart and soul.
It had been a firearm, right enough. A pistol or maybe even a rifle. And he knew where the noise had come from.
Dick wanted to run away, to run blindly, to get away from what eternally pursued him. But he knew with equal clarity that he couldn't do it. He must go where it led him, if only because of Lesley. He turned back, and raced along the brick pavement to the post office. The noise of his own footsteps on brick made flat clamour; it was the only sound in the High Street
Close at hand, you could see a faint pale edge of electric light behind the close-drawn blinds of windows and door.
'Hello!' he called. 'Hello there!’
He expected no reply, but in a sense he received one. Behind that closed door, footsteps on bare boards moved away: quick footsteps, tiptoe and stealthy, retreating towards the living-premises behind.
Dick took hold of the door-handle. Though this door never opened after six - except when Henry Garrett the postman came at nine for the evening mail-collection which Miss Feathers put ready for him in a canvas bag - still the door was unlocked now.
An image of Miss Feathers, who would talk of nothing but her gastritis and the enormities of her customers, rose in Dick's mind now. He flung the door open, and smelled burnt powder-smoke.
Inside the little dingy premises of the post office, a dusty electric bulb shone down on the wire-grilled postal counter along the right, and the drapery counter with its shelves along the left. Its floor-boards, worn smooth and black after so many years, reflected that light At the rear Dick saw an open door leading to the living-premises, from which he could hear the singing and knocking of a boiling tea-kettle.
But he did not look at that, first of all.
The inside of the letter-and-parcels box was under the window on the same side as the drapery counter. Its little wooden door stood wide open. You dropped letters through those slots facing the street, and they fell into the box on this side; but few of them remained in the box now.
The floor on that side, in fact, was scattered with trampled envelopes of all sizes, as though they had been blown wide by a gust of wind. A tightly rolled magazine in its wrapper still bumped along the uneven floor, its blue stamp turning over and over until it lodged against the counter opposite.
And behind the drapery counter, swaying on her feet, stood Miss Laura Feathers herself.
Her dark eyes, though they were glazing and could have seen little, nevertheless had an electric wildness. Incredibly ugly, incredibly dingy she looked, with the greyish hair drawn up in a knot from her ravaged face, and the shapeless dark dress. Shot through the body at close range, she kept the fingers of her right hand, bloodied fingers, pressed hard under her left breast. She must have had some dim comprehension of a newcomer. For with her left hand, which seemed to clutch a fragment of paper, she kept shaking and pointing with frantic vitality towards the door at the rear.
For a second more she kept gaspingly pointing and shaking that hand, trying to speak before she fell over in a heap behind the counter.
Then there was silence, except for the singing and knocking of the tea-kettle in the back room.
CHAPTER l8
IN his dreams, for long afterwards, Dick Markham remembered those eyes fixed on him. They had a pathos, a sick realization of her plight, an appeal which Miss Feathers had never exercised in life. For she was dead now.
Dick found her lying behind the counter, the eyes wide open. She lay on a drift of scattered envelopes, her left hand still pointing forward. But the fingers had relaxed a little before they tightened, suddenly, in the pinching grip of death. The piece of paper she had been holding, slightly bloodstained along the edges, lay beside her hand.
Dick picked it up mechanically, when Miss Feather's body jerked like a fish and then lay still. He could not have told why he picked it up. Yet, subconsciously, something had caught his eye.
The piece of paper was a narrow fragment of the top of an envelope, torn lengthwise and upwards, just missing the stamp. Inside it stuck an even smaller fragment of a sheet of notepaper which had been inside the missing envelope. Typewritten words, a few words which had been left behind of the original note, struck up at him. The torn strip said:
No more. And nothing on the opposite side. But Dick stared at the words as though they were enlarging before his eyes.
For they had been written on his own typewriter.
No mistaking that cranky 'y', which always gave him so much trouble, or the black 'w', which he could never get properly clear. Dick lived for and at and with typewriters;
he would have known his own Underwood anywhere. For seconds he stood looking at this nightmare fragment before something else made him jerk up his head.
Somewhere in the living-premises at the rear, stealthy footsteps again began to run.
He never knew until afterwards how near he came to getting a revolver-bullet through his own heart. For he acted mechanically, without thinking of consequences. Still tightly holding the shred of note and envelope, he vaulted over the counter and ran for the door at the rear.
Three straggling rooms, one behind the other in a straight line, ran out ahead of him. In the first, a sitting- room-kitchen of greasy wallpaper, the table was set for supper and the banging kettle on the hob sent up a cloud of steam. The room was empty. Beyond, another door led to a bedroom - and across this, as he plunged in, he saw an opposite door to the scullery sharply close.
He was chasing the murderer, no doubt of that. The bedroom was dark. Somebody, on the other side of the door in the scullery, was frantically fumbling to turn the key on that side; frantically fumbling to lock the door against him.
And the key wouldn't turn.
Dick, racing for that door, fell at full length over a clothes-horse of underwear set straight in his path. He came down with ajar that bit needles into the palms of his hands, and struck his wits as though with a blow across the brain. But he was up again like an india-rubber cat, kicking the clattering clothes-horse out of his way.
The scullery was empty too.
Smelling of stale water and soap-suds, it was not quite so dark as the bedroom. Its back door, glass- panelled, still quivered against the wall where somebody had flung it open after running out only a few seconds before.
Got away?
No! But...
Grey light outlined against black the oblongs of the scullery windows. Dick emerged from the back door into a sweet-scented dusk rustling with the leaves of chestnut trees, and realized with a start where he had come.
The length of this narrow post office building carried him over fifty feet back from the High Street. Beyond a waist-high stone wall which surrounded the grounds, he could see across from him the side and part of the back of Lesley Grant's house.
The running shadow of the murderer, a shadow blurred to shapelessness, streaked across the lawn. It melted into the outline of a tree, hesitated, and moved softly towards the back door of Lesley's house. No light showed from the kitchen there; no light illuminated a face. Dick was just able to see the edge of the back door open and close, soundlessly, as the figure melted inside.
Into Lesley's house. That meant...
Hold on!
Panting, Dick climbed over the low wall into the grounds. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, other figures swam towards him. For some seconds he had been conscious of a bumping, rattly sound, the noise of a lawn-mower upended and rolled through grass.
