Through the Wall

Chapter 20

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.