Fear by Night: A Golden Age Mystery Page 4

  With the most extraordinary distinctness Ann heard Charles’ voice saying to her in the taxi, “Don’t take this job.” She started a little, banged the door on Charles, and said,

  “Oh yes, I could come to-day if Mrs. Halliday wants me to. May I see her now?”

  Mr. Halliday rose with an air of relief and led the way back to the crimson-trellised cauliflowers. At a door on the right he knocked, and then preceded Ann into the room.

  Mrs. Halliday was sitting bolt upright in a Victorian chair with a hard upholstered seat and back, and a frame of yellow walnut very uncomfortably carved. There was a crazy patchwork cushion on the floor as if it had just fallen. It was a relief to find that there was no gilding. The carpet was an old-fashioned one with a pattern of enormous pink and blue roses on a drab ground. There was a horsehair sofa, also with a walnut frame, and several odd little Victorian chairs covered in woolwork. The curtains were of crimson plush with an edging of ball fringe. There was a deep mantle-border of the same. A little round table with a maroon velvet top and a straight frill of hand-made crochet stood at Mrs. Halliday’s elbow. Upon it reposed a large photograph album with gilt clasps and a massive workbox of Tonbridge ware.

  Mrs. Halliday herself wore a little black silk apron over a full-skirted dress of black cashmere. She had a small black lace tippet about her shoulders, and an old-fashioned net cap upon her neatly brushed grey hair. The tippet was fastened by an enormous brooch which displayed a bunch of flowers worked in hair of different shades, the whole enclosed by a massive border of plaited gold. The cap was trimmed with bunches of narrow ribbon in two shades of magenta. Between the cap and the brooch there jutted out Mrs. Halliday’s bristling eyebrows, her large bony nose, and her very determined chin. The eyebrows were grey and made a fierce slanting line above a pair of very shrewd grey eyes. The face was long and thin. She put out a bony hand with a handsome diamond ring and said,

  “Howdydo?”

  “It’s Miss Vernon, Mother,” said Mr. Halliday. All at once he seemed nervous. He advanced a chair worked in pink and crimson cross-stitch, and was at once bidden to place it at a different angle.

  “And then you can go, my lad. Her and me’ll have our talk without you. Never knew two women yet as didn’t get on better without a man between ’em.” She spoke with a strong country accent, and ended with a chuckle. She had a row of large and even teeth which seemed, most surprisingly, to be all her own.

  When the door had closed upon Mr. Halliday, she turned a sharp look on Ann.

  “Vernon?” she said. “And what’s your Christian name?”

  “Ann.”

  “Just plain Ann?”

  “Just plain Ann.”

  “And a good name too,” said Mrs. Halliday heartily. “My grandmother called three of her fourteen Ann afore she could get one of ’em to live. She was a terrible persevering woman. That’s a piece of her ’air in my brooch. The sprig of white heather, that’s ’ers. Her ’air went a beautiful white afore she died. Seems like mine’s going to ’ang on grey to the end.”

  Ann gazed enchanted at the brooch with its bunch of flowers.

  “Are they all relations?” she asked. “I mean relations’ hair. How thrilling!”

  “Some of ’ems in-laws,” said Mrs. Halliday. She unpinned the brooch and leaned forward with it. “That there buttercup, that was a bit of my mother’s ’air when she was a young girl. So bright’s a marigold—isn’t it? Prettiest girl anywhere within fifty mile, so they did say. I don’t remember ’er. And the little tiddy flower aside of ’er’s, that’s my sister Annie Jane what she died with. My father’s sister, what had a turn for poetry, wrote an ’ymn about it:

  ‘The lovely h’infant and the mother

  Are gone,

  And we ’ave left no other.’

  Which it stands to reason we ’adn’t, my father not being a bigamist. But that’s the way with poetry. I can’t say as it did my Aunt Maria any good. A kind of a mousey woman, she was. That’s her ’air in the stalks—and about all it was fit for. A proper old maid, she was.”

  She replaced the brooch, fastened it with a snap, and said briskly,

  “Well, that’s not business. ’Ow old are you?”

  “Twenty-two,” said Ann.

  Mrs. Halliday nodded.

  “Sixty years since I was twenty-two—sixty and a bit. Lemme see …” The bushy grey eyebrows drew together. “I’d been ten years in the same service. Between-maid first—they don’t send ’em out at twelve nowadays, but they did then, and we were a long family, five of me own mother’s not a-counting Annie Jane, and four that my father’s second wife brought with ’er from ’er first marriage, and another six that they went and ’ad to finish off with. Well, as I was telling you, when I was two-and-twenty, I was second ’ousemaid up at the ’All, and rare and pleased to be getting twenty-six pounds a year. As I says to the ’ussy as we’ve got now, ‘You don’t know when you’re well off,’ I says, ‘And if I’d left dust in my corners same as what you leave in yours, I’d ’ave got a rare old telling-off.’ There’ve been a lot of changes since I was twenty-two. Are you ’oping to be married?”

  “Oh no,” said Ann, and heard Charles’ voice say “Ann!” in the back of her mind.

  Mrs. Halliday nodded.

  “Time enough,” she said. “If girls knew what was in front of ’em, they wouldn’t be in a nurry. When I was twenty-two I was walking out with the under groom, a very ’andsome young man and made the rottenest bad ’usband as you’d meet in a month of Sundays—but not to me, thank the Lord, though I cried me eyes out when he jilted me and took Dorcas Rudd for ’er pretty face, pore thing.” She became brisk again. “What wages are you asking?”

  “Mrs. Twisledon gave me a hundred,” said Ann.

  Mrs. Halliday clicked with her tongue.

  “That’s a terrible lot of money! But you’ll ’ave to settle it with Jimmy.” She chuckled. “Thinks ’e’s made of money these days, Jimmy does! And I won’t say ’e isn’t a clever lad, and a good son too. ’E don’t grudge me anything, I’ll say that for ’im.”

  “Then you’d like me to come, Mrs. Halliday?” said Ann. “You think I’d suit you?”

  Mrs. Halliday nodded with decision.

  “I know a lady when I see one,” she said.

  Chapter Five

  Ann rang Charles Anstruther up from a telephone box in the nearest post office. The roar of traffic from the great thoroughfare outside was suddenly dead as she pulled the door to behind her. A light flashed on in the ceiling, and after that Charles was saying,

  “Ann, is that you?”

  Ann said, “Yes,” a little faintly, because there had leapt into her mind the realization of what it might be to shut the door on the world and let it go by. The world shut out, and she and Charles shut in. An impossible dream, but unbearably sweet, as only a dream can be.

  There was nothing dreamlike about Charles’ voice as he said,

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter.”

  “Why did you speak like that?”

  “I didn’t speak like anything.”

  “Yes, you did. Ann, are you going to dine with me to-night?”

  “No, I can’t. Oh, Charles, I’ve got the job! Isn’t it marvellous? What did you say?”

  “I said damn,” said Charles.

  “Beast!” said Ann. “And when I told you I’d been living on dry bread!”

  “Ann!”

  “To-night,” said Ann in a gloating voice, “I shall be dining with Mr. James Halliday. I should think we’d have hot-house peaches, and turtle soup, and asparagus, and strawberries.”

  “Out of season,” said Charles morosely.

  “Darling Charles, that’s why. It’s that sort of house—all plush, and gilding, and lincrustaed halls.”

  “Who is this man?” said Charles in a voice that jarred the telephone.

  “Darling Charles, you’ll bust the wire if you roar like that, and then I shan’
t be able to tell you about my nice job. But perhaps you don’t want to hear.”

  “Who is this man?” said Charles, still with a good deal of vigour.

  “It’s all quite proper and respectable,” said Ann. “He’s old Mrs. Halliday’s son, and I’ve been hired at the princely salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year to listen whilst old Mrs. Halliday talks.”

  “Then why are you dining with Mr. Halliday?”

  “Because Mrs. Halliday doesn’t dine. She has what she calls ’a bite of supper and bed’.”

  Charles said, “Dine with me.” Then after a pause he said her name—just “Ann”; but his voice made it sound like “Ann darling.”

  Ann took a step back as if he were there and visibly trying to hold her.

  “Charles, I can’t.”

  “Where have you gone? I can’t hear you.”

  Ann stopped forward again.

  “I said, ‘I can’t.’ I’m taking over the job at once—just going home to pack, and moving right in.”

  “When am I going to see you?” said Charles tempestuously.

  “I don’t know,” said Ann. And then she said “Good-bye,” and pushed the receiver back upon its hook. She couldn’t hear Charles’ voice any more.

  It was perfectly idiotic for her heart to be beating so hard. She stood there until it quieted, and then she opened the heavy glass door and the roar of the traffic rushed in.

  In the house in Westley Gardens Mr. James Halliday was also using the telephone. He said,

  “That you, Gale?… It’s all right—she’s coming in to-night. How is he? About the same?”

  Rather an abrupt voice answered.

  “Of course he’s about the same. He won’t be any different till he’s dead.”

  “Well, well, well,” said Mr. Halliday, “there’s no hurry about that, you know. If he can be kept going for a month, why, so much the better.”

  “A month? What’s the good of saying a month? He might be gone to-morrow, or he might hang on for half a year. You’ve got to get her away. The minute the breath’s out of his body there’ll be a swarm of reporters nosing round, and it won’t be twenty-four hours before someone gets hold of the terms of the will, and the next thing you’ll know, she’ll be seeing her name in the headlines with ‘Rich Man’s Heiress’ underneath. You’ve got to get a move on or we’re done.”

  “All right, all right!” said Mr. Halliday. “You know, Gale, you talk too much. I rang you up to tell you something, and you talk so much that you’ve pretty near put it out of my mind.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “And you’re a lot too impatient too. It’s a job that’s got to be done carefully. I was going to tell you that the old lady asked her what we weren’t sure about—whether she was thinking of getting married or anything of that sort—and she said no as cool as a cucumber.”

  A sound that was almost too angry for a laugh came to him along the wire.

  “You make me tired! Do you suppose she’d give herself away at a first interview, and a business interview at that?”

  Mr. Halliday assumed a tone of offence.

  “Well, I’m sure Mrs. Halliday put it very nicely, and I don’t see why the girl wouldn’t have told her if she was engaged.”

  There was the angry sound again.

  “Nice respectable middle-class mind you’ve got! Haven’t you, Jimmy?”

  The offence in Mr. Halliday’s tone deepened.

  “What’s wrong with being respectable?” he said. “And what’s wrong with a girl saying she’s got a boy, even if she isn’t right down engaged to him? The way I look at it is, she’d say so because she’d want time off to see him, and the old lady says she was very decided that there wasn’t anyone.” There was a pause. Mr. Halliday said, “You there, Gale?” and was barked at.

  “Of course I’m there! When are you getting off?”

  “Well—I thought about Monday,” said Mr. Halliday rather dubiously.

  “Five days? Much too dangerous.”

  Mr. Halliday coughed.

  “The old lady don’t fancy starting on a Friday—she’s got an idea it’s unlucky—nor she don’t fancy a Saturday, nor a Sunday.”

  “What’s this infernal nonsense?”

  “I won’t go against the old lady,” said Mr. Halliday.

  “What’s wrong with Saturday?”

  “She don’t fancy it,” said Mr. Halliday. “She isn’t so downright set against it as she is against the Friday or the Sunday, but she don’t fancy it much. I might try her again.”

  The man he called Gale fairly made the receiver crackle.

  “She’s got to fancy it! Do you hear?”

  “Well, I’ll try,” said Mr. Halliday. “Good night to you, Gale.” He hung up the receiver.

  Gale was in a fume. Gale always did put himself in a fume. Elias Paulett wasn’t going to die before Monday. He was just the sort to hang on, and on, and on. Still if there was any risk, they’d better shift on Saturday. That was the worst of dealing with anyone like Gale—you didn’t know when to take them seriously. If Gale wanted you to do a thing, he’d pitch you a tale, and how were you to know whether it was a true one? He supposed they’d better shift on Saturday.

  He set about making his arrangements.

  Ann slept that night at Westley Gardens. Her room was over Mrs. Halliday’s sitting-room. Mrs. Halliday had the bedroom over the drawing-room, and her maid, a stout elderly person of the name of Riddle, had a slip of a room between the two. It had been intended for a dressing-room, and it was a tight fit for Riddle.

  Ann’s room was a little smaller than the room below. It was furnished in bright yellow maple. The carpet, the curtains, the bed-spread, and the china were of a lively pink, but the bed was so comfortable that it almost made up for it.

  Ann fell asleep and dreamed that she was running away from Charles down a primrose path. There was a bonfire at the bottom of the path, and someone whose face she couldn’t see was feeding it with bright yellow furniture and bright pink china. The china crunched and smashed under her feet, but she couldn’t stop. She ran right into the fire and heard the flames go roaring past, and old Mrs. Halliday said, “Girls wouldn’t be in such a hurry if they knew what was in front of ’em.” And then quite suddenly the fire was gone, and the light, and the noise. Everything seemed to have stopped, and she was in a dark place. Something moved, just out of reach. It moved again and came nearer, and in the last moment before she woke Ann knew what the something was.

  But when she was awake she didn’t know any more. She sat up in bed with her hand pressed tightly to her breast. There were beads of sweat on her forehead. Her hair clung to her temples. Something had made her afraid, and for a moment she had known what the something was. But now she didn’t know.

  It was a long time before she went to sleep again.

  Chapter Six

  The next day was Thursday, and in the course of it Mrs. Halliday imparted to Ann a great deal of family history. It made her head go round, because Mrs. Halliday ranged over some eighty years which she remembered herself, and another fifty or sixty which she had been told about by her uncles and aunts, and brought up, as from a crowded lucky bag, quarrels, courtships, births, marriages and deaths. You never quite knew to within fifty years what century you were in. At one moment Mrs. Halliday would be recounting the infant virtues of her son James—“’Is ’air curled lovely, and he weighed ten pound when he was born.” And the next, with voice dropped to a whisper, she was imparting details of the scandal which had parted her great uncle Amos and his wife—“an ’ussy if ever I see one—not as I ever did see her, she being dead and buried afore I was born, and a good job too, coming mixing and meddling in a respectable family with ’er ringlets and ’er rooge.”

  By degrees, however, Ann gathered that Mrs. Halliday had married late—“I’d a brown cashmere dress wot my lady give me, and a black straw ’at with a nice bunch of cornflowers one side, and a pair of brown kid gloves with bras
s buttons.”

  Halliday, it appeared, had followed the sea—a north-countryman and close in his ways—not, Ann gathered, a good husband—“And few and far between they are Miss Vernon, my dear. A young man courting is one thing, and an ’usband is another—too loving to last is what I say, and it’ll save you a lot of disappointment if you don’t count on it. You take a good-living, respectable man with a bit in the bank—that’s my advice.”

  “It sounds frightfully dull,” said Ann.

  “There’s worse things than being dull,” said Mrs. Halliday.

  By way of an improving anecdote about a second cousin once removed who was so foolish as to marry a chance-come young man with a handsome face and a wheedling tongue, and who very properly ended in the workhouse, they returned to Mr. James Halliday. He was an only child and the best son that ever was. He too had followed the sea, and then he had a bit of luck and went into business—“’E’s a great one for business is Jimmy, and set on my having the best of everything.”

  “Does this house belong to you?” said Ann.

  “No, Miss Vernon my dear, it doesn’t—not but what it mightn’t come to that if ’e brings off something as ’e’s got in ’and. ’E’s got it furnished, and what they call a h’option, which is to say that ’e can buy it if ’e likes. But it belongs to Mr. ’Iggins—the Mr. ’Iggins as won the big prize in one of they Irish sweepstakes, pore feller.”

  “Why?” said Ann.

  “’E got the money and ’e bought the ’ouse, and ’e done it up lovely from top to toe and furnished it fit for Buckingham Palace, and then if ’is wife didn’t put ’er foot down and say she wouldn’t live in it. Burst into tears right there in the ’all she did, and said as she wasn’t brought up to it, and if she’d got to live in an ’ouse where ’er kitchen wasn’t ’er own to sit in and she’d got to dress in velvet, she’d rather be dead and in her coffin right away and save a lot of trouble. Pore-spirited, I call it—put me in mind of my Aunt Maria when Mr. ’Iggins told me, and I said to ’im, ‘Such being the case, better let ’er ’ave ’er kitchen, for you won’t get any peace and quiet until you do.’ Crying like a leaky tap all the time she was. So ’e let the ’ouse to James.” She paused and added, “With a h’option.”