Rehearsals for Murder Read Free

why I want to take it up”—she gave a deprecatory giggle—“but all the same, I think it’s a good idea, don’t you?”
    â€œI think,” said Toby, “that if you’re staying here the night the sooner you get to bed with that cold of yours the better.”
    She started to protest that that would mean turning them out of their sitting room since it was in the sitting room that she was determined to sleep. Nothing, she said, would persuade her to allow either of them to disarrange themselves because she happened to be staying there.
    â€œAnd, really,” she said, “it isn’t late, and it’s such ages since I’ve seen you, Toby; it’s nice to be able to talk.”
    â€œNo,” said Toby, “it’s quite late enough. You run along off to bed.”
    â€œBut I’m going to sleep in here,” said Lou. “You needn’t argue about it. It’s definite.”
    â€œIs it?” said George, and it was in George’s room that she slept, while George arranged blankets and cushions for himself on the sitting-room floor.
    â€œWho is she, Tobe?” said George, after she had gone and he and Toby had been left in peace to finish the coffee.
    The worried laugh with which Toby answered mixed itself up with a yawn. “I met her first about two years ago. It was at some sort of a party. She’d had a very little to drink but she was pretty helpless already. It frightened her rather. I took her away and walked her round the place and counselled her, and after that she attached herself to me and tried to get me to instruct her in everything about life—including facts of same.”
    â€œWhat’s she do?” said George, prodding with his spoon at some sugar.
    Toby replied: “Looks for jobs, mostly, and lives on the dole. Now and then she’s a secretary for a bit or a shop girl or a doctor’s superior young lady who opens the door and books appointments. She hasn’t any parents. So far as I know the only relations she’s got are a brother and sister-in-law in Surrey, and she’s not too keen on them. She likes her company a bit colourful. Wonder what’s frightening her now. Might be blackmail; she’s just the sort of idiot who could be made to believe that some perfectly innocent affair had got to be paid for through the nose. I ought to have made her tell me what it was. I’ll have another go in the morning.”
    He threw the stub of his cigarette onto the cold hearth, rose and trod on it.
    â€œPart of her trouble, of course,” he said, “is that she’s got a spontaneous humanity that’s really quite unusual. She’ll do anything for anybody. A nice kid.” He yawned again. “Pretty often I’d like to murder her.”
    When somebody did murder Lou Capell Toby was among the first to hear of it.
    Lou had left the next morning before either George or Toby was awake. She had left George’s room neatly tidied, with a note propped up on the chest of drawers thanking them both for their kindness.
    Toby had spent the afternoon and some of the evening at the newspaper office where he sometimes put in an appearance.
    It was at about a quarter to nine that he received a telephone call at his flat. A faint voice which he did not recognize said to him: “Toby Dyke? I am speaking from Wilmer’s End. Lou Capell is dead—murdered. Did you hear what I said?—murdered. Your cheque has been removed. But hadn’t you better come here?”
    The speaker rang off.
    Toby set the telephone slowly down and sat staring before him. …
    The death that came to Lou Capell was a horrible one. It was so horrible that the young man who had to describe to the police how he had found her body had turned, in spite of his recent medical degree, a blanched mauve in the face, while his hands were restrained from trembling only by an effort obvious to all.
    The police had