She Died a Lady Read Online Free Page A

atmosphere of subtle decay.
    You became conscious of the place’s isolation, of its Godforsaken loneliness after dark. Anything could happen here; and who the wiser?
    The light had grown so bad that I was compelled to switch on my head-lamps when I drove in. The tyres of the car crunched on sand. Nothing else stirred. Hardly a breeze from the sea ruffled that muggy heat. Behind the bungalow, beyond a long stretch of damp reddish soil, you could dimly make out the line of the cliffs which fell seventy feet to rocks and water below.
    The light of the head-lamps, hooded, ran ahead dimly to the open doors of the garage. It was a double garage, with Rita’s Jaguar inside. As I slowed down, a figure appeared round the side of the house and wandered towards me.
    ‘Is that you, Doctor?’ Alec called.
    ‘Yes. I’d better run the car into the garage, in case it rains. Be with you in half a tick.’
    But Alec didn’t wait. He blundered over into the glow of the head-lamps, and I had to stop altogether. Putting his hand on the door of the car, he peered up and down the drive.
    ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Who cut the telephone-wires?’

THREE
    T HE engine of the car had stalled, and I started it again. Alec was not even angry: he sounded merely puzzled and troubled. Though you could smell whisky about him, he was quite sober.
    ‘Cut the telephone-wires?’
    ‘It was that damned Johnson, I expect,’ Alec declared without rancour. ‘The gardener, you know. He wasn’t doing his work. Or at least Rita says he wasn’t. So I had to sack him. Or at least Rita sacked him. I hate trouble with people.’
    ‘But …’
    ‘He did it to spite me. He knows I always ring up Anderson at the Gazette office every evening to see if they’ve got any news that isn’t released to the BBC. The phone wouldn’t work. Then, when I lifted it higher, the wires came loose from the little box. They’d been cut and stuck back in again.’
    For a second, there, I thought Alec was going to cry.
    ‘It was a low trick, a damned unsportsmanlike trick,’ he added ‘Why won’t people let you alone?’
    ‘Where are Rita and Mr Sullivan?’
    Alec blinked.
    ‘Come to think of it, I don’t know. They must be somewhere about.’ He craned his neck round. ‘They’re not in the house. At least, I don’t think they are.’
    ‘Hadn’t I better go and round them up, if we’re going to play cards?’
    ‘Yes. Do that. I’ll go and get us something to drink. But we won’t play cards just yet, if you don’t mind. There’s a very fine radio programme going on at eight-thirty.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘I’m not sure. Romeo and Juliet , I think. Rita particularly wants to hear it. Excuse me.’
    He moved across the sparse-grown lawn in the twilight, and stumbled over something. As though instantly conscious that I might think he wasn’t sober, he glanced round, tried to look dignified, and sauntered on.
    I ran the car into the garage. A nerve was switching in the calf of my leg when I got out. It was not that I was so anxious to find Rita and young Sullivan: I wanted a chance to think.
    First I walked round to the back of the house. The breeze was colder here, smoothing down coarse grass on the edge of the cliff; the stretch of damp red soil was deserted. Hardly seeing anything, deaf and blind with preoccupation about those cut telephone-wires, I circled the bungalow and passed the summer-house.
    They must have heard me. From inside the summer-house there was a stifled, startled exclamation. I glanced round – the light was just good enough to see inside – and then I walked on very quickly.
    Rita Wainright was half sitting, half lying across a mat on the grubby wooden floor of the summer-house. Her head had been bent back, and her arms were round Sullivan’s shoulders just before he sprang away. Both faces turned towards me. The open mouths, the peculiar guilty shine of the eyes, the frightened spasmodic reaction of heightened senses: I saw these