Читать книгу Vanishing Point - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 10

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That same afternoon, coming out of the Holly Tree, Craig Lester observed a tall figure making a leisurely approach from the direction of Crewe House. No one had ever told him that Miss Crewe was a secluded invalid, but he had somehow received that impression. His visit to her room had not been repeated, though upon one pretext and another he had managed to see Rosamond and Jenny every day, but the picture of her sitting there in her velvet wrap with the blazing chandelier throwing its unsparing light upon all those crowding relics of the past had remained with him, and he had thought of her as fixed in that place and unable to leave it. Jenny had said things about Aunt Lydia’s bell ringing all the time and Rosamond having to run because she didn’t like to be kept waiting. He had heard the bell himself time and again and seen Rosamond start up and hurry away, yet here was Miss Crewe in the flesh coming towards him and walking without so much as a stick. Seen on her feet, she was even taller than he had supposed—and more formidable. She carried herself as if her spine were a steel rod with no joints in it. Her eyes under a rather battered black felt hat stared at first blankly and then with haughty recognition. She wore dark grey tweeds with a skirt nearly down to her ankles and a shabby black fur coat. No one could have taken her for anything except what she was—autocrat and aristocrat to the tips of her rubbed kid gloves. She gave Craig the slightest of bows and passed on, her destination being the white house set back from the street on the opposite side from the Holly Tree and some twenty yards farther on. It had a small garden in front of it gay with crocuses, and a pair of yews cut into an archway over the gate and continued in a low hedge on either side of it.

After three days in Hazel Green Craig was aware that Mrs. Merridew, the late owner of Dalling Grange, resided there. “A very nice lady,” as Mrs. Stubbs informed him. “And a deal more comfortable at the White Cottage than she’d be at the Grange, which wants a regular staff to run it, and cold and draughty past belief. I worked there as kitchenmaid when I first went out—all stone passages and great big rooms that hadn’t been used for years, enough to break your heart. But she’s very comfortable here with Florrie going in to do for her every day.”

In the true spirit of village gossip Craig enquired, “And who is Florrie?” and received quite a flood of information about Florrie Hunt herself, her parents, now both deceased, and her other relations, of whom there appeared to be several in the neighbourhood.

“Mr. Hunt, he was second gardener at Dalling Grange. No ambition, that was what was wrong with him. All he wanted was to go on growing the vegetables same as he’d always done, and Florrie’s a chip off the same block. She’s a real good cook, and she could do a lot better for herself than going in daily like she does to Mrs. Merridew. But there, it takes all sorts to make a world, and the Hunts are all the same. Poor Maggie Bell now—her mother was a Hunt, and she was just such another. And then in the end off she goes and never a word out of her, which is a thing you couldn’t credit, not when you knew her. And if you ask me, she must have met with an accident or something, and nothing to tell anyone who she was.”

There was a lot more about Maggie Bell, and how the police had come into it but nothing found out. And then back to Mrs. Merridew again, and how nice for her to have an old schoolfellow to stay.

With this in the back of his mind, Craig Lester watched Miss Crewe go by. He had arrived at a rear view of her uncomfortably straight back, when Henry Cunningham emerged from the narrow lane between the White Cottage and the Vicarage wall. It was obvious that he and Miss Crewe would meet. Craig found himself a little curious as to their present relationship. So far no talk on this point had come his way. It was not so much that there had been any avoidance of the subject as that Mrs. Stubbs, his main source of information, had been much too busy telling him all about Dalling Grange and how it was to be hoped that they wouldn’t all be blown up in their beds some night, and the haunted house at Hazel Lea where, according to local repute, a clock struck twelve at the half hour past midnight every Michaelmas Eve and you could hear the splash of something falling into the well that was filled in fifty years ago. Mrs. Stubbs had a stirring repertory of ghost stories, and as one put her in mind of another, she had not so far got round to the Cunninghams and the Crewes. It might be that discretion as well as charity began at home. Whatever the cause of her silence, he felt enough curiosity to make him stand where he was and watch to see how these two people met.

He saw what everyone in the village had seen during the last three years—what anyone in the village might see on any day of the week. He saw Henry Cunningham put up a nervous hand to his hat, and he saw Miss Lydia Crewe look him full in the face and cut him dead. Craig Lester could not see that bleak stare, since he had only a sideways view, but he could imagine it well enough. There was a slight glacial pause. Henry Cunningham’s hand dropped to his side, and Miss Lydia Crewe turned in between the arching yews and walked up the flagged path to the White Cottage.