Vanishing Point

CHAPTER 39

Lydia Crewe went back to her room and put on all the lights- not only the big chandelier with its many-faceted lustres, but the gilt and crystal sconces on either side of the chimney-breast and between the windows, until every inch of the crowded room sprang into view. The curtains hung across the windows in the dark straight folds, but this was the only darkness which remained. There was no place for shadows under the blaze of those unsparing lights. She sat down in her chair, stiffly upright, rigidly controlled. Her heart still beat more heavily than it should have done. She set her will to steady it. The dark garden was shut away from her by a barrier of walls, a barrier of lights. If it was nerves which had played her a trick, they should learn that she was their mistress. If it was Jenny-

She held her anger in a leash and would not let it go. Jenny could wait. This was no time to take an extra risk. It was Lucy who was the danger, not Jenny, playing with a blue Venetian bead which no one would ever see again. It was gone, and tomorrow Jenny would be gone to the school which Millicent Westerham had described as “a bit rough and ready, but the discipline is excellent and the fees really low.” Jenny wasn’t going to like the excellent discipline of Miss Simmington’s school. It might perhaps be left to deal with her, at any rate for the present.

She came back to Lucy Cunningham, who was the real danger.

After that interview with Henry it would be safer to wait, but she couldn’t risk it. And in a way it would be all to the good, because he would be able to say in the most truthful and convincing manner that poor Lucy had been in an extremely nervous state and had complained about not being able to sleep. Only of course he must stick to that and not go beyond it. He had neither the nerve nor the clarity of mind to lie convincingly.

Well it must be done tonight. More people than Henry would have noticed that Lucy hadn’t been herself all day. When she was found in the morning, it would be just one more case of an elderly woman who couldn’t sleep and had gone beyond the safety line in the matter of a drug. Her mind began to busy itself with the details. Henry and Nicholas must be asleep. Lucy had often complained that nothing woke either of them once they were off. They must have time to be so profoundly asleep that no one would ever know that she had returned to the Dower House. No one except Lucy, and Lucy would not be in a position to tell what she had known. It would have passed with her into the silence from which there is no coming back.

The voice which she had heard in the garden whispered at the edge of consciousness and was refused. The dead could not return. They had no power to harm. You were safe from them. When Lucy was dead she would be safe from her… Time went by.

When at last she rose to her feet she was steady and resolved. Her bedroom lay beyond with a connecting door. She went through to the bathroom on the other side, a converted room with some of the furniture which had belonged to it still taking up what should have been clean, clear space. She went to the small bureau in the corner and lifted the flap. There were a number of pigeonholes behind it, all stuffed with papers-old bills, old correspondence, things she had never troubled herself to deal with. When she had cleared the second hole from the left she felt for the spring which disclosed a small inner compartment. It was empty except for just one thing-a glass bottle very nearly full of white tablets.

She put everything else back, tipped a number of the tablets into the palm of her hand, and contemplated them. They were more than twenty years old-nearer thirty. Old Dr. Lester had prescribed them for her father in his last illness. One, or at the outside two if the pain became severe. On no account more. She wondered if the drug would have kept its strength. She had never heard anything to the contrary, and she would just have to chance it. Better make the dose a stiff one-say ten tablets. She counted them out and put them into a tumbler to dissolve with a little hot water. She would need a small bottle for the liquid. After some deliberation she selected from a cupboard a three-parts empty bottle of ipecacuanha wine, washed it out carefully, and when the tablets were fully dissolved corked them up in it.

She stepped out into the passage, resolved and confident, and enough at her ease to walk back as far as Jenny’s room and try the door. If it had been open, she would have locked it again and taken the key. She had not been at all satisfied with Rosamond’s response when the matter was discussed, and she did not intend to be flouted. But the key was turned and the door fast. She passed down the passage and across the hall. And so by the side door and the dark familiar path to the Dower House.