Poison in the Pen

CHAPTER 30

Miss Pell lived three houses beyond the post office. Now that she was alone there, the house was too big for her and she was thinking of taking a lodger. Only of course she would have to be very particular about the sort of person she would take. A man was not to be thought of, and a female lodger must neither be so young as to have the slightest inclination towards flightiness, nor so aged as to be a possible liability in the way of attendance or nursing, a thing which Miss Pell was careful to explain you undertook for your own family- and she would be the last to shirk her duty to a relative- but she couldn’t, no she really couldn’t consider it in the case of a stranger. Doris ’s room was therefore still unoccupied.

The house was one of a row of cottages all joined together, so Miss Pell had no need to be nervous. If she were to knock upon the wall on the right as you looked to the front, old Mrs. Rennick would knock back and call out to know what she wanted. If she knocked on the left-hand wall, young Mrs. Masters would do the same. There were, of course, drawbacks to this state of things, because Mrs. Rennick disagreed a good deal with her daughter-in-law. They carried on long arguments from one room to another. And though the Masters baby was very good on the whole, it did sometimes cry.

But then, as Miss Pell had often said, when you sit and sew all day it’s nice to hear what’s going on next door.

Miss Silver paid the visit, to which Randal March had raised no objection, at about half past three. Miss Pell admitted her to a narrow passage with a stair going up on one side and a half open door on the other. Everything was very clean, but the house had the peculiar smell inseparable from the profession of dressmaking. The room into which she was ushered had a goodsized bay window. It seemed improbable that it was ever opened.

Seen in the light, Miss Pell appeared to be about fifty years of age. She had sparse greyish hair brushed back from the forehead and pinned into a tight plait at the back. Her features were thin and sharp, her complexion sallow, and her eyelids reddened. She began to speak at once.

“If it’s about some more work for Miss Renie, I’m afraid I couldn’t undertake it-not at present. You are the lady who is staying with her, aren’t you-Miss Silver?”

Miss Silver said, “Yes,” adding with a friendly smile, “And you are too busy to take any more work?”

“I couldn’t manage it-not for a long time,” said Miss Pell. She spoke in a curious faltering way, running two words together, pausing as if she was short of breath, and then going on with a rush. She went on now. “I haven’t really caught up, not since my poor niece-staying with Miss Renie, you will have heard about her, I daresay. And apart from missing her as I do, I was left with all the work the two of us had in hand, and I don’t seem to be able to get it straightened out.”

Miss Silver knew trouble when she saw it, and she saw it now. The reddened eyelids spoke of lack of sleep. She said in her kindest voice,

“I know that everyone has felt the deepest sympathy with you in your loss.”

Miss Pell’s lips trembled.

“Everyone has been very kind,” she said. “But it doesn’t bring her back. If it hadn’t been for those letters-”

She didn’t know what made her speak of the letters. She had been asked about them at the inquest, but ever since she had tried to keep them out of her mind. Wicked, that’s what they were, and not fit language for a Christian woman to call to mind. And Doris always such a good girl. She felt her way to a chair and sat down because her legs were shaking. Her thought found its way into words.

“She was always such a good girl. None of the things in the letters were true. She was a good Christian girl.”

Miss Silver had sat down too.

“I am sure she was, Miss Pell. If the person who wrote those letters could be found, it might save some other poor girl the same experience.”

Miss Pell stared at her.

“Anyone that was wicked enough to write those letters would be wicked enough to know how to hide themselves.”

“Do you think that your niece had any idea who had written them?”

Miss Pell’s hands, which were lying in her lap, jerked and closed down, the right hand over the left.

“There wasn’t anything to say who wrote them.”

“If she had had any idea, in whom would she have been most likely to confide?”

“She hadn’t any secrets from me.”

“Sometimes a girl will talk to another girl. Had your niece any special friend? Was she, for instance, friendly with Connie Brooke?”

Miss Pell looked down at her own clasped hands.

“They had known each other from children,” she said. “Miss Renie will have told you I was maid to Miss Valentine’s mother, Mrs. Grey-and a sweet lady she was if ever there was one. When my brother died and I had to take Doris, Mrs. Grey let me bring her to the Manor. And just about then Mrs. Brooke and her little Connie came to Tilling Green, so there were two little girls very much of an age, and Miss Valentine was the baby.”

“And they went on being friendly?”

“Really fond of each other, that’s what they were. The very last bit of work Doris did was to alter a dress for Miss Connie. And she must have been one of the last people she spoke to too, because that was one of the things she went out for that afternoon, to go along to the school and let Miss Connie have her dress.”

Miss Silver looked at her gravely.

“Miss Pell, you knew, did you not, that Connie Brooke was believed to have told Mr. Martin that she knew who had written those letters?”

“It wasn’t Mr. Martin who said so.”

“No, it was his housekeeper. It was all over the village that Connie Brooke knew about the letters, and that Mr. Martin had told her that it might be her duty to go to the police. Do you not think it would have been her duty?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Miss Silver waited for a moment. Then she said,

“Connie died next day, as suddenly as your niece did. If she had told Mr. Martin what she knew, I believe that she would be alive to-day. It was all over the village on Saturday that Colonel Repton had been heard to say that he knew who had written the letters. On Monday afternoon he was dead too. If he had told the police what he knew, he would not have died. Now, Miss Pell, I think that you know something, and I think it is of the first importance that you should tell what you know.”

A little colour came up into the sallow face. The eyelids came down for a moment over the faded eyes, and then were raised again. In a changed voice Miss Pell said,

“It is the third sign-”

“Yes, Miss Pell?”

“Once by a dream,” said Miss Pell, looking fixedly at her, “and once by the Bible text, and once by your mouth. If there was a third sign, I said that I would know what I had to do.”

If the words were strange, her manner was perfectly composed. Her hands now held each other lightly and without straining. Miss Silver said,

“There is something you know and that you think you ought to tell?”

The answer she received was an indirect one.

“I will tell you about the signs. You won’t understand unless I tell you about them. Because when Doris came home that day I promised her that I wouldn’t speak of what she told me, and it isn’t right to break a promise to the dead- not unless there is a sign, and I’ve had three. She said to me, ‘You’ll never tell, Aunt Emily, now will you?’ And I said, ‘Of course I won’t.’ Nor I wouldn’t ever, if it hadn’t been for the signs.”

“What were they, Miss Pell?”

“The first was a dream that I had in the night. Last night it was, and as clear as if I was waking. I was here in this room and sewing on something black, and I was crying over the work, and I remember thinking that it would be spoiled, because nothing spots quicker than black. And then the door opened and Doris and Connie came in together, holding hands like they would when they were little girls. They had a big bunch of flowers between them, holding it-lilies, and roses, and all sorts. And there was a light all round them, so that they shone. Doris was on the right and Connie on the left. In my dream they came right up to me, and Doris said not to cry any more, because there was no need, and not to trouble about the promise I’d made, because it didn’t matter. And I woke up in my bed upstairs with the alarm clock going.”

Miss Silver said very kindly indeed,

“It was a comforting dream.”

Miss Pell’s eyes were full of tears.

“It ought to have been, but it wasn’t. I’d heard about Colonel Repton, and I kept troubling in my mind about whether the dream meant that I was to break my promise and go to the police, and whether it was a sign, or whether it had just come up out of my troubling about what I had said to the police. I hadn’t told any lies-I wouldn’t do that-but when they asked me if I had told them all I knew, I just put my handkerchief up to my face and cried, and they thought that I had.”

“I see.”

“So I thought what I could do to make sure about the sign. And what I did, I took my Bible and I shut my eyes and opened it just where it fared to open and put my finger on a verse. And when I opened my eyes it was the sixteenth verse of the eighth chapter of Zechariah, and it said-‘These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates.’ So I thought, ‘If that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.’ And then it come over me that I’d never broke a promise in my life, and that I’d got to be sure. And I thought, ‘If the Lord wants me to speak, he can send me a third sign just as well as the other two, and if there is a third sign, I shall know that it’s from the Lord and I shall know what I’ve got to do.’ And then you come knocking at the door, a stranger, and the very words of the sign in your mouth, telling me that there was something I knew, and that I should tell it.”

Miss Silver repeated the words.

“Yes, I think you should tell it.”

Miss Pell brought out an old-fashioned linen handkerchief neatly folded and touched her eyes with it.

“It was that last day before Doris was drowned. She went out in the afternoon, and she’d got a mauve silk blouse she was taking to Miss Maggie at the Manor, and a dress she’d made for Miss Wayne, a blue wool that she had, coming out of mourning for her sister, and she said it was a little tight under the arms though I couldn’t see it myself, so Doris had been letting it out. Quite a round she had, what with leaving the blouse, and the dress, and looking in to settle the pattern of a couple of nightdresses for Miss Eccles and finishing up with Miss Connie. She left the dress she had been altering for her to the end because of the children not coming out of school until four. Well, she went there, and she was properly upset, the same as she was when she came back home. And at first she wouldn’t tell me anything at all, only that there was something not quite right about the neck of Miss Maggie’s blouse and she’d promised to alter it quick and run up with it in the evening. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’re not letting yourself get upset about that, are you?’ And she said, ‘No, Aunt Emily, it isn’t the blouse,’ and she burst out crying. So then I went on at her to tell me what it was, and she said if she did, would I promise faithfully never to breathe it to a living soul-and I promised. So then she told me.”

“What did she tell you?”

“She said it had come to her who had written those dreadful letters, and she said it was this way. There were the four houses she’d been in that day-up at the Manor with Miss Maggie’s blouse, and at Willow Cottage with Miss Wayne’s blue wool, and into Holly Cottage about Miss Mettie’s nightgown. And last of all in at the Croft with Miss Connie. That’s the only four houses she was in. And in one of them-and she didn’t tell me which-she picked up a little bit of paper that was on the floor. You know how it is, if you see something lying about like that, it just comes natural to stoop down and pick it up. Well, that’s what Doris did, and when she’d got it in her hand she could see it was a torn-off piece of one of the letters she’d had. A bottom left-hand piece it was, with the Til of Tilling on it. Torn right in half the word was on the letter when she got it, where it said everyone in Tilling Green knew that Doris went with men on the sly. Well, there was this piece and she’d picked it up, and she came over faint and had to sit down.”

Miss Silver said quickly, “Which house was it?”

Miss Pell took a long sighing breath.

“She never told me. I told her she would have to, and she said she didn’t think she ought, and perhaps it would be better to tell the person she knew and make them promise solemn that they’d never do it again. I asked her if she’d told Connie, and she said, ‘No more than I’ve told you, and she’s promised the same as you have.’ ”

Miss Silver said slowly, “But Connie said that she knew who it was.”

“There may have been something that she thought about afterwards. She came here to me on the Monday-that would be a couple of days before she died-and she said had Doris told me about the bit of paper? And I said whatever Doris told me, I’d promised I wouldn’t say a word. So she said, ‘Well, you don’t need to, because I know what you know, and a bit more too.’ I asked her what she meant, and she said it was something Doris had said that she remembered. ‘Doris picked up a bit of paper, Miss Pell,’ she said, ‘and she didn’t say where she picked it up, but she said how white it showed up against the carpet, and she said what colour the carpet was.’ Connie said she didn’t think about it at first, but it had come back to her, and now she couldn’t get away from it because she knew the house that had a carpet that colour, and that would be the house where Doris had picked the paper up.”

“She really did say that?”

Miss Pell put up her hand to her head for a moment.

“Oh, yes, she said it just like I’m telling you. I’ve wished she hadn’t ever since, but once a thing’s said it’s said, and you can’t take it back any more than you can forget it when it’s been said to you.”

“And Connie said the paper showed up white against this carpet, but she didn’t tell you what the colour of the carpet was?”

Miss Pell shook her head.

“No, she didn’t, nor what house it was in, nor anything more than what I’ve told you. She sat just there where you are sitting now, and she told me about the bit of paper, and she said, ‘I wish Doris hadn’t told me, for I don’t know what I ought to do. You see, Miss Pell,’ she said, ‘if I tell, it will get round to the police, and even if it doesn’t it’s going to cause the most dreadful talk and the most dreadful trouble, and perhaps a case in court, and me having to go into the witness box and tell about someone that is a neighbour and would never get over it if I did. And what good will it do now Doris is dead? It won’t bring her back again.’ And I said, ‘No it won’t bring Doris back.’ ”

Miss Silver said gravely,

“It might have saved Connie’s own life if she had spoken. Have you said anything about this to anyone except myself?”

She shook her head again.

“There’s been enough talk. And Doris is dead, and Connie is dead. The way I see it there’s been too much said already. And if anyone had told me I’d talk the way I have to a stranger, I wouldn’t have believed them. And I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for my dream, and the verse in Zechariah, and what you said when you come in.”

Miss Silver got up to go. But before she left the room she said very earnestly indeed,

“Do not tell anyone, not anyone at all, what you have just been telling me. If it comes to telling the police, I will be there, and I will make sure that you are adequately protected.”

Miss Pell looked first surprised and then a good deal alarmed. She had risen from her chair, and now went back a step, her eyes widening and her face paling. The nervous hesitation with which she had begun the interview had returned upon her. She said with trembling lips,

“They say it’s a sin to take your own life, but I say the sin is on them that drove poor Doris to it-and Connie too.”

“Miss Pell, I do not believe that Connie Brooke took her own life, and I am beginning to have very grave doubts as to whether your niece did either.”

Miss Pell’s hand went up to her shaking lips and pressed them hard.

“You don’t think-oh, you don’t think there was anything done to them by somebody else?”

Miss Silver said, “Yes, I am afraid I do.”