It was while the bus was conveying Miss Silver quickly and easily down the hill to Farne that two young people were making their way in the opposite direction. They had walked out from Farne and taken the footpath which leads across a field to the common land along the cliffs. The path goes no farther because the ground has never been enclosed, being too rough and uneven and continually cut up and worn away into small rifts and combes. There is some growth of rough grass, gorse, and bramble, and though the beach below is private and considered to be inaccessible, it is not really very difficult to climb down and steal a bathe.
Ted Hollins and Gloria Payne were about to scramble down what Ted indicated as “the place Joe and I got over,” when they heard the sound of voices coming up from the beach. Ted stopped, listened, and went on again, moving gingerly and putting out a hand behind him to check Gloria. But when he came to a place where he could see over, there she was, right up against him, her shoulder bunching into his, craning her neck to see what he was looking at. And neither of them could see a thing.
The rift they were in had taken them half way down the cliff, the rest of the way was easy enough. They could see the long inviting stretch of sand left bare by the tide, a ridge or two of piled-up shingle, and then the bulge of the cliff was in the way. They couldn’t see the two people who were standing right down under them where the beach ran in to meet this little combe. There was a man, because it was a man’s voice which they had heard to start with—a man’s voice, but not his words, only the angry echo as if they were something he was chucking about and getting chucked back at him again. But what the woman said was as plain as plain—“All right—go on and do it! You’ve said you’re going to often enough. Go on and murder me if you feel like it!”
Gloria pursed up her mouth and said, “Ooh!” Her lips were so close to Ted’s ear that her breath tickled him. He put up a hand to rub the tickle away just as if she had been a fly, and they both heard the man say, “I will when I’m ready—you needn’t worry about that,” and they heard him go striding away over the shingle with the stones grinding and creaking under his feet.
Since the woman showed no signs of following him, Ted and Gloria made their way back to the top of the cliff, where they talked about how long it would be before there would be a chance of getting a couple of rooms let alone a house, and whether if the worst came to the worst, they couldn’t just make do at Dad and Mum’s. Since Gloria shared a room with a sister and there seemed to be nowhere else for Edith to sleep, it wasn’t a very helpful prospect. And Ted’s landlady wouldn’t take in a wife, not if it was ever so. “Next thing you know, there’s nappies on the line,” was the way she put it. And when Ted up and said, “What’s wrong with that?” Mrs. Crole, she looked at him like any thunderstorm and said, “You wait and see!”
“Reely anyone ’ud think a baby wasn’t human, wouldn’t you?” They had said this to one another quite a number of times, the accepted response being a gloomy “Seems like it.”
“And all they go on saying to us is we’re young.” Ted pitched a pebble over the cliff. “Anyone ’ud think that meant you hadn’t got your feelings, and no right to have them!”
Gloria said, “That’s right.”
They went on talking about themselves.
Ina Felton was very unhappy. Once your eyes are open you can’t help seeing things, and once you have seen them you can’t go back to the time when you didn’t know they were there. She locked her door, and thought about Cyril in the spare room. And wondered whether he would come and turn her handle and try to get her to let him in.
She stood a long time at her window looking out over the sea, but he didn’t come. It was a relief, but it was the kind of relief which comes when you have made up your mind not to go on hoping any more. The night was lovely—no moon, but light coming from the sky, and the air a dark transparency. She could see the blossom against the garden wall glimmering like a ghost, its rosy colour gone. She could see the slow resistless movement of the tide. It was coming in. Where there had been smooth shining sand, the water deepened. As she stood there she could see how it kept rising, rising, without hurry and without rest. The point of rock which had been clear a little while ago was gone now, the water covered it without a ripple. You couldn’t stop things like the tide, and thought, and what was happening in your life.
She stood there for a long time before she undressed. There was a clock on the floor below—a big old clock with a slow, soft tick, and a slow, heavy stroke for the hours. It stood in the hall, and if she was awake in the night she liked to feel it was there, and that if she listened it would tell her the time. She was awake a good deal in the night, and it was company.
She was turning back her bed when she heard it strike—just the one heavy stroke which meant that another day had begun. She stood there listening, because she had lost count of the time and she was not sure if there would be another stroke.
She was just going to move, when she heard a faint sound on the landing. It stopped her before she had really moved at all, because she knew what it was. The board outside the spare room creaked when you stepped on it. She had heard it every time she came and went, with soap, with towels, with bed-linen, getting the room ready for Cyril. All the other boards were steady. It was just this one that made the sound. She stood quite rigid with her eyes on the handle of her door and waited to see if it would move. The bedside lamp was on. All at once it went tingling through her that it might show a line of light under the door.
Before she knew what she was going to do her hand went out and turned the switch. Then she went over to the door and stood there, a finger on the handle to feel if it would move.
She couldn’t hear anything. The board did not creak again. She had no feeling that anyone was coming nearer. She thought that if Cyril was crossing the landing bare-foot to her door, she would have some feeling. Her heart beat to suffocation, and it came to her that she did not know what the feeling would be. Everything in her couldn’t have changed so much that she would find herself shrinking. Or could it? She didn’t know.
There was another sound. It was nowhere near the door. Perhaps from the stairs. Perhaps even farther away—from the hall. She turned the key in the lock. Then she let her whole hand close on the door knob and turned it too. The door swung in.
The landing was dark and empty. A very faint light came up from the hall. It was so faint that it was really only a thinning of the darkness, but she could see the line of the balustrade which guarded the stairs, heavy and black against the greyness below.
She came out of her room past the short passage which led to the other house. The door at the end of it was bolted top and bottom. There was one of these doors on every floor, and they were all the same, bolted on this side, with a key to turn on the other.
She came to the top of the stairs, but before she could come round the newel-post she heard the sound again, and this time she knew what it was. Someone was drawing back the bolts on the door in the hall.
She stood quite still where she was and listened. There was the same short length of passage that there was upstairs, and the door at the end of it with a bolt at the top and a bolt at the bottom. Since she had heard the sound twice, it would not come again, because both the bolts must have been withdrawn. The only other sound that could be looked for would be the turning of the key on the farther side. But it might have been turned already, before she came out of her room. If it had been, she would not have heard it. She listened to see if she would hear it now.
And then it came—just a faint click, and before she had time to think whether she had heard it or not she knew that the door was opening, and that someone was coming through. There were two people in the passage now, and one of them had come through from the other house. Two people—and one of them was Cyril, who had gone downstairs in the middle of the night and drawn back the bolts.
Her knees shook. She was holding to the newel. She let herself down until she was crouching behind the balustrade. It screened her, but she could see over it. She had let herself down because she couldn’t stand any longer. Not to screen herself, or to see more. But in the result she found herself protected from being seen, and in a better position to see. If there had been a light in the passage now, she would have been able to see the whole length of it.
And then there was a light—the sharp white beam from a small pocket torch. It struck the surface of the door between the houses—old dark paint, rather scratched and chipped. It danced across, and there was no gap at the edge—the door was shut. It slipped like a dazzle on water across a woman’s dark skirt, a woman’s white hand with shining blood-red nails, and came to rest in a trembling circle on the floor.
As soon as Ina saw the hand she knew that it was Helen Adrian who had come through the door in the wall. Anger, humiliation, and pain suddenly rushed in upon her. It was one o’clock in the morning, and Cyril had slipped down to let Helen Adrian in. They were there in the passage now. She could hear them whispering there. It was the faintest of faint sounds, like a stirring of leaves in the wind. The round eye of the torch stared on the floor, and its reflection shook, and moved, and shifted there. There was a row of pegs with coats hanging from them—old raincoats, hers and Marian’s, umbrellas, and a scarf or two. The torch swung up. Cyril had it in his left hand. She saw his right hand come through the beam and unhook one of the coats. Then it came down again. A scarf of Marian’s came down with it. It was a new one she had bought. A square. Very gay and pretty—shades of blue and yellow. It fell right through the beam of the torch, and Ina was vexed, because it was new, and because Marian liked it, and it was one of the very few things she had got for herself. Right in the middle of all that was happening she could feel vexed about Marian’s scarf.
And then she was more than vexed, she was angry. There was a rustling. Helen Adrian was putting on Marian’s coat.
It was just an old raincoat, but she hadn’t any business to come in here in the middle of the night and take it.
The beam of the torch swung out and back across the blue and yellow of the scarf lying there on the floor. She saw Helen Adrian’s arm in the shabby sleeve of the raincoat come down into the light, she saw the hand with the crimson nails. The torch swung round towards the hall. The two people in the passage came that way. Helen Adrian was tying the scarf over her hair. She didn’t quite laugh, but her whisper had a laughing sound. It carried up the well of the stair. Ina heard her say,
“Safe enough now.”
And Cyril said,
“You can’t be too careful.”
It was all just on the edge of sound. It was so nearly over the edge that she might not have heard it at all. Through all the days that followed she was to ask herself what she had really heard. But it always came back to that “Safe enough now,” and, “You can’t be too careful.”
They crossed the hall to the study door, and went in and shut it after them.
The hotel in Farne was really very up to date. Not only was the food exceptional and the service prompt, but there was a telephone in every bedroom. Richard Cunningham had one beside him as he lay watching a light haze draw up off the sea and melt into a cloudless sky. He could rise early when he chose, but he had not chosen today. It was too pleasant to be at nobody’s beck and call, with another perfect day in prospect. All this, and Marian too. They had travelled a long way yesterday. They would travel farther today, and tomorrow—
The telephone bell rang. He put out his hand, took up the receiver, and Marian was speaking.
“Richard—is it you?”
At once there was a shadow. Her voice was steady only because she would not let it shake. That came to him. Control. What had happened that Marian must control her voice when she spoke to him? This in a flash while he said,
“What is it?”
“Something has happened.”
“What?”
“Something dreadful. There’s been an accident.”
“To whom?”
“To Helen Adrian. Richard, she’s dead.”
“How?”
“We don’t know. The two women who help next door, Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Woolley, they get here at eight. The aunts have tea in their rooms—Helen too. She wasn’t there. They thought—she and Felix—had gone down—to bathe. Mrs. Woolley went a little way, to see if they were coming. She couldn’t see them. She went down farther. She saw Helen Adrian lying on the beach where the last lot of steps go down. You remember how steep they are. Mrs. Woolley thought she had fallen and hurt herself. She went down to see. And Helen was dead.”
He had a picture in his mind of the last steep drop to the beach. The path took a turn. There was no rail—or was there? For the moment he wasn’t sure. Then the blurred picture cleared. The garden was terraced to the beach. The last steep steps went down from the lowest terrace to the shingle of the cove. A railing guarded them. But there was no railing to the terrace itself. It followed the sloping line of the cliff, and on the narrowest side it fell steeply.
Into the picture in his mind there came, small and clear, Helen Adrian lying under the drop, her hair bright against the stones. He said,
“Horrible!”
He heard her take her breath.
“Yes. I rang to tell you not to come out. It won’t be—very pleasant. There will be the police—” She wouldn’t let her voice shake, but she couldn’t make it go on.
He knew just why she had stopped like that. He said,
“Marian, let me come. It’s horrible for you and Ina. There might be something I could do. I’d like to be there.”
She got her voice going again. It was steady but faint. It said,
“You’d better not. You don’t want to get mixed up in it. There’ll be—reporters. You see, it wasn’t—an accident. They think someone—killed her.”
He said her name quickly, insistently. And then,
“But of course I’ll come! What did you think—didn’t you know? Look here, I’ll be out as soon as I can make it.”
“You mustn’t—”
He said, “Don’t talk nonsense!” and hung up.
When he got out to Cove House Mrs. Woolley was still alternating between being overcome by her feelings and the urge to enlarge upon the most exciting experience that was ever likely to come her way. She had already told the whole thing a good many times—to her sister Gladys Bell between hysterical sobs; to an augmented audience of Penny, chalk-white and rigid; to Mrs. Brand and Miss Cassy; to Eliza Cotton; to Miss Marian Brand and Mrs. Felton; and finally to the police, who rather belatedly instructed her not to gossip. The narrative had by now become set. She used the same words, and stopped to cry in the same places. She went through it all again for Richard Cunningham, from the moment when, receiving no answer to her knock, she had opened Miss Adrian’s door and looked in to find the room empty, to the moment the recollection of which really did make her heart thump and her head swim when she had looked from the narrow end of the last terrace to the beach and seen a body lying there on the stones below. “And I don’t know how I got down those steps—I don’t reely. Seems to me one minute I was up there looking down at her, and the next there I was, taking her poor hand. And of course I knew she was dead, because it was as cold as ice, let alone her head being all smashed in, poor thing.”
There was a police sergeant from Farne in charge, but within the next half hour superior authority had begun to function. Inspector Crisp arrived from Ledlington and at once proceeded to make himself felt. The whole ghastly business which waits on murder was set in motion. Mrs. Woolley went through her story again, photographs were taken, and one by one every member of the two households were interviewed. Every member except one. Felix Brand was not in his room. Had not been in his room when Mrs. Bell went up and knocked on the door, which was just before her sister ran in panting and crying from the beach. He was not in the house, or in the garden, or in the cove. Nobody, in fact, had seen him since half past ten the evening before.