One morning when the postman knocked me up and presented me with a registered letter for which a signature was required, I signed obediently, having no idea, until he had gone and I had taken it to my room and a better light, that the letter was not for me but was addressed to Miss Minnie at The Lodge.
'Oh, damn!' I thought, as I looked out at the pouring rain, the soaked lawn and the dripping November trees. 'She'll have to wait for it. I'm not traipsing out in this!'
However, a registered letter is a registered letter, so, cursing the weather and ignoring Niobe's call that breakfast was ready, I put a waterproof over my pyjamas, put on some shoes and ran across the lawn. Lights were on in several parts of the house, but the bungalow was unlighted and the curtains, I I could see, were still drawn. I pushed the registered envelope through the letterbox, beat an exasperated tattoo on the door and pelted back to the house to get dried and dressed.
Niobe was not very pleased.
'No need to have gone out there before breakfast,' she said. 'I've kept yours hot, but it isn't the same as when it's first cooked. She'll probably stay in bed till eleven or later, on a beastly dark morning like this.'
'Not with the bashing I gave her front door,' I said.
'I wonder what was in the envelope? Did you open it as you opened the other one?' Niobe asked nastily.
'Money, perhaps, as it was registered,' I said, ignoring the thrust.
I thought no more of the matter. We were already making preparations for Christmas and I had planned a cocktail party, with a Christmas tree and presents for everybody. On Christmas Eve, Hempseed and Cassie, unusually subdued and well-behaved since their Terpsichorean exhibition on the lawn, could be heard in their flat practising carols to Constance Kent's guitar, while the sounds of sawing and hammering from the Evans-Kent apartment seemed to prove that Evesham was carrying out a promise he had made to Cassie, a devout Catholic whenever she troubled herself to go to church - hers was a long way off - that he would make her a crib.
All seemed set for a happy if not a particularly peaceful period when the postman came again with an offering for Miss Minnie. This time it was a fairly bulky parcel.
'This is the third time I've brought it, and never nobody at home,' he told me resentfully, 'and in this weather, sir, that's not funny. There is never nobody at home in that bungalow, not to take in that registered letter nor nothing, so, without you're willing to take it in for the lady, I'll have to leave her a note that she'll have to go and collect this parcel herself from the Post Office. I've done more than my duty already and I can't tote this here parcel around no more times. It would mean her going into the town for it if I don't leave it with you. Please yourself, of course, sir. You don't have to accept it if you don't want.'
'Oh, I'll take it,' I said. I put it down underneath the hall table, did not think to tell anyone else that I had taken it in and, in the general bustle of preparations, Christmas shopping, ordering in drinks and food and being driven almost demented by Constance Kent's guitar and Evesham Evans's incessant carpentry, I forgot all about it. It was not until our expensive and cultured charwoman complained about it that it came to my mind that it had been in my possession for some days.
'Which, if I have moved that parcel once, sir, in order to clean the hall floor, I have moved it twenty times,' she said angrily.
This I knew to be picturesque exaggeration, but she had made her point.
'Good Lord! I'd forgotten it was there,' I said. I fished it out and went out in the rain to deliver it. I failed in my object. The curtains of the bungalow were still drawn and seemed to say, like Macbeth's porter, 'Knock, knock, knock! who's there, i' the other devil's name? But this place is too cold for hell.' I continued to knock. Then I began to shout. Then I banged on each of the bungalow windows in turn. Then I became alarmed. Poor old Miss Minnie, I concluded, had been taken ill. We were so used never to see her about that it had not occurred to me to wonder why she had not answered the door to the postman or made any enquiries about a parcel which, ten to one, she must have been expecting. I felt bad about the parcel. It probably contained a Christmas present.
I tore back to the house and hammered on Evans's and then on Targe's door. It would not take the three of us to break the kitchen window, which was the only one uncurtained, but I did not want the responsibility of being alone in discovering Miss Minnie either desperately ill or even dead in bed.
She was dead all right, and she was in bed. There had been water everywhere and her head was in the most dreadful mess. It was Latimer Targe who dealt competently with the situation. He was hardboiled mentally, no doubt, by his years of researching into violent crime. He sprinted back to the
