Till Death Do Us Part

'But, Dick! Somebody did try to kill him! Somebody shot at him with a rifle!'

'The bullet didn't hit him, did it?'

'No,' returned Cynthia, 'but that jolly well wasn't for want of trying!' Her breast rose and fell. She added: 'Is it about Lesley?'

Dick swung round.

'Is what about Lesley?'

'This thing that's worrying you,' said Cynthia with simple feminine directness. ' Why should you think it's about Lesley ?' 'What else could it be?' inquired Cynthia. She did not stop to explain the logic of this remark, but went on: 'That horrid little man,' and .she pointed to the figure in the chair, 'has been upsetting everything and everybody at Six Ashes. First there was the accident with the rifle yesterday afternoon. Of course it was an accident' - briefly, the blue eyes seemed to ponder - 'but it does seem queer that somebody deliberately tried to shoot him this morning. And, on top of that, you say he poisoned himself with what's-its-name acid'

'There's your evidence, Cynthia.'

She spoke abruptly. 'Dick, it just isn't good enough.'

'How do you mean, isn't good enough?'

' I don't know I That's just the point. But - did you hear about the row between Major Price and Mr Earnshaw, late last night? Over somebody stealing the rifle?'

'Yes. Lord Ashe told me.'

Again Cynthia pointed to the figure in the chair.

'Dick, what did he tell you about Lesley?'

'Nothing! Why in God's name do you think he said anything about Lesley?'

'He was reading things in the crystal about everybody else. I bet he read something about Lesley, and that's what's worrying you.'

Hitherto Dick had always considered Cynthia as a good fellow but not exactly as a model of intelligence. To avert this danger-point now, he laughed until it seemed to him that the military prints round the walls rattled in their frames.

'If there is anything,' insisted Cynthia, with a sort of coaxing motherliness, 'tell me. Do tell me!'

'Look here! You don't think Lesley had anything to do with this?'

'But why ever should I think that?' asked Cynthia, with her eye on a corner of the carpet. Faint colour tinged her face. 'Only ... it's all so queer! Hadn't we better report this to the police? Or do something about it?'

'Yes. I suppose so. What time is it?'

Cynthia consulted a wrist watch.

'Twenty minutes past five. Why?'

Dick walked round, to the front of the desk. The motionless figure,, one eye partly open, surveyed him with so sardonically lifelike an expression that this dead man might have been laughing in hell.

'I've got to phone Bert Miller, of course.'

Miller was the local constable, and it should take him no great time to get here. Though Gallows Lane technically ended in open fields a few hundred yards eastwards - a gallows had stood there in the eighteenth century; Dick's stomach turned over at the thought - still there was a path over the fields to Goblin Wood. Bert Miller lived near there.

'But the person I must get on to,' he insisted, 'is Dr Middlesworth.' ‘Why Dr Middlesworth?'

'Because he's heard about the other cases. And we've got to decide -' ‘What other cases, Dick?'

As near a slip, as near a betrayal, as made no difference! Dick pulled himself together.

·I mean, criminal cases in general!'

'But you said this wasn't a criminal case,' pointed out Cynthia, who was watching him fixedly and seemed to be breathing faster. 'You said he killed himself. Why do you say something different now ?'

That he did not answer this question was due less to being concerned than to the fact that his attention was caught by something else, which added a touch of the grotesque to the dead man's expression. Again he went forward to inspect the body, this time from the opposite side.

On the carpet at the side of the chair, this time as though fallen from die victim's left hand, lay a spilled box of drawing-pins.

A little cardboard box, with drawing-pins or thumbtacks spilled on the carpet. Hypodermic syringe near the right hand, drawing-pins near the left It made the wits whirl even more, with its neat arrangement. Dick picked up one of the drawing-pins, pressing its sharp point against his thumb and noting in an idle sort of way that it would have made much the same sort of puncture in a human arm as (say) a clumsily administered hypodermic ...

'Dick!'cried Cynthia.

He scrambled hastily up off his knees.

'Telephone,' he said, to forestall the torrent of questions he saw in her eyes. 'Excuse me.'

The telephone, he remembered, was out in the hall. He unlocked and unbolted the door, observing both the weight of the lock and the small tight-fitting closeness of the bolt.

Talking to Middlesworth, he thought, was going to be infernally difficult with Cynthia in the next room. The ringing-tone buzzed interminably, before it was answered by the unmistakable bedside voice of a woman just roused from sleep.

'Sorry to trouble you at this hour, Mrs Middlesworth! But -’

'The doctor's not in,' said the voice, controlling itself. 'He's up at the Hall.' 'At the Hall?'

'At Ashe Hall. One of the maids was taken badly in the night, and Lady Ashe was worried. Isn't that Mr Markham speaking?'

'Yes, Mrs Middlesworth.'

' Can I take a message, Mr Markham ? Are you ill?'

'No, no! Nothing like that! But it's rather urgent'

' Indeed. I am sorry he's not here,' murmured the voice, with restrained suspicious pleasantness. A G.P.'s wife learns how to manage this.' If it's urgent you could ring him there. Or walk across the park and see him. Good-bye.'

Walk across the park and see him.

That would be better yet, Dick decided. If he cut through the coppice and'up over South Field, he could reach Ashe Hall in two minutes. He hurried back to the sitting-room, where he found Cynthia biting uncertainly at her pink under-lip. He took her hands, though she seemed reluctant to extend them, and pressed them firmly.

'Listen, Cynthia. I've got to go up to the Hall; Middlesworth is there now. I don't mean to be gone longer than ten minutes. In the meantime, will you ring Bert Miller and then stand guard? Just-tell Bert that Sir Harvey Gilman has committed suicide, and that he needn't hurry in getting here.'

'But-!'

'The old boy did commit suicide, you know.' 'Are you going to trust me, Dick? Tell me about it later, I mean?' 'Yes, Cynthia. I will.'

It was good to have somebody he could trust, to have Cynthia's straightforwardness and practicality in the mists of nightmare. He pressed her hands again, though she would not look at him. Afterwards - when he left the house - crossed the lane, made his way through the dark birch-coppice and up over the green slope of South Field to Ashe Hall - the image of a very different girl went with him.

Let's face the ugly fact, now. If Lesley had done this ...

'But surely,' argued his common sense, 'Lesley wouldn't have killed Sir Harvey Gilman just to keep him from betraying her identity to the people of Six Ashes?'

'Why not?' inquired a horned and devilish doubt.

'Because,' said common sense, 'it will only bring in the police, and betray her identity in any case.'

'Not necessarily,' returned the doubt, 'if it is handled by the local authorities and treated as a featureless suicide.'

'But Sir Harvey Gilman fa a well-known figure,' common sense insisted. 'This will be in the papers. It will probably meet the attention of someone at Scotland Yard.'

The doubt took on a kind of evil laughter.

'You yourself,' it said, 'are a rather well-known young playwright. Your suicide would be in the papers. Yet Sir Harvey himself never doubted that this angel-faced lady might well be arranging to poison you!'