Читать книгу Dr. Morelle and the Doll - Ernest Dudley - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

Helen Hafferty stood by the window staring out at the last glimmer of daylight fading from the garden. The trees in the orchard were vague shadows.

He is late, she thought. He had never been late like this before. A vague uneasiness stirred in her and she turned away from the window, letting the heavy velvet curtain fall back into place.

The others were waiting; Helen Hafferty, conscious that she was separated from them by the wall of middle age, watched them grouped round the fire in the wide fireplace with the bookshelves on either side. They were all here, except Nicky her youngest son, and he was unpredictable and moody; but there was Charles, nine years older, and her only daughter, Olivia.

Helen Hafferty’s eyes went to Charles’ wife, Marie, sitting in the low armchair. Again a sense of uneasiness assailed her.

Marie suddenly looked up and caught her mother-in-law’s eye.

‘Tod’s very late,’ she said abruptly. ‘Hadn’t we better start tea?’

Olivia glanced at her mother. ‘I think we ought to wait a while longer,’ she said. She got up from her chair by the fire and came over to Helen Hafferty. ‘You’ll get chilly here.’

Her mother let herself be persuaded to sit near the fire. Olivia’s husband, Bill Parker made a polite gesture of offering his chair but Helen Hafferty didn’t seem to see him. Instead she sat where Olivia had been sitting.

Bill Parker shrugged and relaxed again. When Olivia came and sat on his knee he began to smooth her thigh with his hand. Her eyes darkened in her thin, once-pretty face and she pushed his hand away. Parker smiled maliciously across at Marie Hafferty, as if expecting his sister-in-law to be amused, but she turned her head away.

Parker sighed. ‘I’m not waiting much longer,’ he said a little irritably. ‘I’ve a lot of work to get through before tomorrow.’

‘Really, Bill,’ Olivia said petulantly, ‘on a Saturday evening?’

Parker shrugged and his face went mutinous. ‘I can’t help it if people are queuing up to buy houses. You ought to be pleased. It means money in the bank.’

‘Especially,’ Olivia added, as if she hadn’t heard him, ‘after spending all afternoon in the office.’

‘He did?’ Marie Hafferty looked incredulous.

‘Had a whole list of new properties come in,’ Parker said, ‘just before we left. I had to prepare them for circulation. The sooner our clients know about them, the sooner we’re likely to sell.’

Charles grinned his slow grin. ‘How you chaps make a living out of buying and selling houses beats me.’

Marie Hafferty said: ‘There’s a lot goes on between one chap wanting to sell a house and another mug wanting to buy it. Isn’t there, Bill?’

Parker gave her an amiable smile. ‘That’s one way of putting it, Marie, darling.’

Helen Hafferty’s voice broke in. ‘I can’t think where Tod can be. Perhaps we had better start tea without him.’

‘I’ll tell Bess,’ Olivia said, and she went across to the door. She called down the hall. ‘We’ll have tea now, please.’ A slow, muttered reply reached the others as Olivia came back into the room, and turned to her brother. ‘Charles, I think you ought to go out and look for Tod.’

He glanced at her in surprise.

‘He could have caught his foot in a rabbit-hole or something,’ Olivia said, her thin face worried. ‘He’d never be able to get home.’

‘There’s no way of knowing where he is,’ Charles said. ‘It’d take over an hour to walk the whole way.’

‘You’re making a fuss about nothing,’ Parker said to his wife. He looked at his watch. ‘He must have gone off somewhere. He might have called in to talk to Major Kelly.’

He turned sharply as Marie laughed. ‘Come off it; Tod and Kelly? They’re poison to each other.’

Charles said slowly: ‘She’s right though. Tod would never call in on the Kellys. And there’s no one else around here he’d be likely to call on.’

‘Of course he hasn’t gone to see anyone,’ Olivia Hafferty said, her face taut with anxiety, as she gave a look towards her mother. ‘It’s too bad of you, Charles, arguing, when he might be lying hurt somewhere.’

The other threw down the magazine he’d been reading and pulled himself out of his chair. ‘All right. Where d’you want me to start?’

‘You’ll have to go the same way Tod always goes. Through the orchard and then through Asshe Woods and down to the road, back here. Full circle.’

Charles groaned. ‘It’s a long way. And it’ll be dark in ten minutes.’

‘You’d hear him if he was calling out,’ Olivia said. ‘Anyway you can take a torch.’

Marie said to her husband: ‘Want me to come with you?’

He shook his head. He threw a grin at Helen Hafferty. ‘If he turns up while I’m looking for him,’ he said, ‘you’d better send him out again to look for me.’

His mother said nothing as she watched him go out of the room. Marie looked at her, then at Bill Parker, his hand straying over his wife’s leg again. He might have gone with Charles, Marie Hafferty thought. She stared back into the fire. And where was Nicky, she wondered? He was always grumbling about his father but he would have gone out to look for him. Or would he?

Thoughts of Nicky made her heart beat faster. The fire was hot against her eyelids. The door opened and Bess was there, pushing the tea-trolley in front of her. Moon-faced Bess Pinner’s eyes were like little bright marbles behind their convex lenses, her thin white hair scragged back, showing pink scalp on top of her head.

She said: ‘Will that be all, Mrs. Hafferty?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Helen said. ‘We’re starting tea without Mr. Hafferty.’

‘Mr. Charles has gone to look for him,’ Olivia said.

The convex lenses turned to her. ‘Why, d’you think he’s gone and got himself lost?’ And without waiting for an answer Bess went out, closing the door behind her.

Helen Hafferty shrugged, switched on the big standard-lamp in the corner, and turned to the tea-trolley. The elegant china glimmered, as she arranged the cups and saucers. There was a small dish of thinly sliced lemon; she drank her tea with lemon, instead of milk. Olivia was handing round bread-and-butter.

Marie drank her tea quickly. Where was Charles by this time, she wondered? Searching Asshe Woods with the wind whining through the trees and the grass wet with early dew. She shivered suddenly. The heat and cosiness of the white-painted panelled room suddenly stifled her. She stood up abruptly, her cup rattling in its saucer.

‘I’m going to look for Charles,’ she said and while they were all staring after her, she hurried out.

Marie Hafferty stood in the hall, a tensed figure, pretty in a plump way. In the light from the small chandelier the white walls crowded with photographs and framed posters glinted. All photos or cinema-posters of Tod Hafferty in the different films in which he had starred, long ago and far away.

Her expression seemed to become curiously tired as her gaze travelled round. From every side his face looked out at her, or he showed his once-wonderful profile; the straight nose, the rounded, cleft chin.

She got a raincoat out of the little cloakroom and went along the passage past the kitchen. She heard Bess Pinner moving about on the other side of the door. A radio was playing. She pulled the side-door open and the February evening, darkening, seemed to flood in. She stepped out into the garden.

She waited until her eyes grew accustomed to the night. Soon she was able to distinguish the details of the garden, the brick path to the small orchard beyond.

This was the way her father-in-law had gone.

On the other side of the orchard a gate opened on to the rough path to Asshe Woods. That was the way Tod Hafferty took whenever he set out for his walk. Along the rough track and through another gate in the wire-fencing where the woods began. Then on through Asshe Woods to the road, which inclined high enough to look clear across the River Stour towards the old, deserted port of Richborough. Then the road dipped again until it joined the road to Asshe House, Tod Hafferty’s home the past seventeen years, since he had brought Helen and his family to live here away from London, during the war.

Three o’clock until around four-thirty, that was the time Tod Rafferty went walking.

Only this afternoon he had not come home.

Marie Rafferty searched the darkness for the gleam of a torchlight that would be Charles returning. She saw it, a will-o’-the-wisp, behind which moved the solid figure of her husband, approaching through the orchard. He had not gone on through Asshe Woods to the road, she thought, and returned by the road, the way Tod Hafferty did. He had not completed the full circle.

She could hear the swish-swish of his shoes through the dew-sodden grass as he drew nearer, and she called out to him.

There was no reply, and a tingle of apprehension ran down her spine. She called again. The moving torchlight halted, and then the end of its powerful beam searched for and found her. She blinked in the glare, and put her hand over her face in an ill-tempered movement.

‘That you, Marie?’ Charles’ voice came to her, with its typical unnecessary question.

‘Where is he?’

There was no answer as he stood before her, his face eerie in the reflection from the torch. She could not see the expression in his deep-set eyes, which were black shadows thrown by the torchlight. It was as if he was wearing a pair of dark glasses, she thought, and again that flutter of fear caught at her.

His hidden eyes seemed to be boring into her; she could not see them, but she could feel them. ‘Do put the light out,’ she said irritably, ‘you’re wasting the battery.’

He obeyed her instantly, and now she could make out his face as the darkness closed round them. It was a pale oval, blurred beneath the shadow of his hat-brim, and his eyes took on some life, glinting at her.

‘Do you think something’s happened to him?’ she said.

He didn’t answer her, and she moved closer to him. His face seemed to take on a tautness, almost as if it was changing shape. His mouth moved, as if he found it an effort to form the words.

‘I—I don’t know,’ he said.

But once more she experienced that tingling presentiment, and she felt sure he was lying to her.