Not to be Taken Read Free Page B

up the medicines herself.’
    ‘She didn’t today. She was catching the nine-forty to Torminster, I know, because she asked me to go in with her. Besides, didn’t you hear Glen say he made it up himself?… I wouldn’t let Glen make up a bottle of medicine for me,’ Frances added defiantly. ‘He’s far too casual.’
    ‘My dear girl, what on earth are you hinting at?’
    ‘Why, that Glen made some stupid mistake or other and put the wrong drugs in. Anyhow’ – Frances suddenly whisked into view an object which she had been holding behind her back – ‘anyhow, here it is.’
    I stared at the half-empty medicine bottle.
    Then I laughed. ‘Well, prevention’s better than cure. You mean to make sure that John doesn’t get another dose?’
    ‘I mean more than that,’ Frances said soberly. ‘I’m all for standing by one’s friends and that sort of thing, but doctors oughtn’t to make careless mistakes. Can’t we have this stuff analysed or something?’
    5
     
    We were thus in the affair, as it were, from the beginning.
    Actually, however, I do not date that first evening of John’s illness as the beginning. In my own mind I always put the beginning at a little dinner party which the Waterhouses had given about a week earlier. That was the first time, for instance, that I heard any mention of the gastric ulcer. In any case, whether the link is a real one or not, there is certainly a link of irony; for the conversation took a somewhat morbid turn after dinner was over, and what could be more ironical than a man’s discussing murder and sudden death only a few days before his own?

chapter two
     
    Conversation Piece
     
    It is a queer feeling to reconstruct the intimate past and bring the dead to life again in all the trivial details of everyday life; but I must try to do so if I am to fill in a full background for the picture which I have set myself to paint. And perhaps all the details were not so trivial either. Or alternatively, if they were genuinely trivial, efforts were to be made later to give them a sinister ring. In either case I will set them down just as they happened.
    The Waterhouses had six guests that evening. In addition to Frances and myself there were Glen and Rona Brougham, brother and sister; Harold Cheam; and Daisy Goff, whom everyone had been trying for years to pair off with Harold, including Daisy herself.
    We were late, I remember, and only just had time to swallow our cocktails, with the uncomfortable feeling that dinner was being held back especially for us. It is a curious thing that the less distance one has to go, the more likely one is to be late. It was only three minutes on foot from our front door to the gates of Oswald’s Gable, but I think that each time we dined there, and that was fairly often, we ran it fine. The Waterhouses generally ran it fine when they came to us, too; but that may have been due to Angela, one of those women who seem to find it impossible to be punctual for anything. She has her invalidism to excuse her, of course, and she never fails to make use of it; but to my mind there is never any excuse for being late, even when I am the culprit.
    Nothing very much remains in my memory of the dinner itself, nor of what we men talked about after the women had left the table. But of a conversation in the drawing-room later (Angela Waterhouse retained the old-fashioned word, and certainly the big, rather formal room deserved it) I have the most vivid recollection.
    We had split somehow into two groups. Angela had a new batch of records down from London, and she had collected Daisy to help her listen to them and Brougham to put the records on the machine for her. Angela was always rather good at collecting people against their wills; for I am sure that neither Daisy or Brougham wanted in the least to hear the kind of music which Angela professed to admire. Frances, however, did want to hear it, and joined the others to do so. Their group was scattered over the