Rehearsals for Murder Read Free Page A

been summoned to Wilmer’s End by a hysterical telephone call from Mrs Clare.
    Wilmer’s End was a house about a mile and a half out of the small town of Larking in Surrey. It was one of those houses that present to the road the appearance of little more than a roomy cottage. Bricks and weather tiles of an old, warm red and honeysuckle over the doorway heightened this impression. Yet it had, in fact, an amazing number of rooms, several bathrooms, electric cooking and garage space for at least three cars. It was known in Larking to be the property of Roger Clare of the publishing firm of Roger Clare and Thurston. Larking also knew that he had recently divorced his wife and left her to live at Wilmer’s End without him.
    When Inspector Vanner and Sergeant Gurr arrived Eve Clare herself was waiting in the doorway. She was in a wild impatience to tell her story and to shift responsibility. One of those very slim women with quick, delicate movements, in whom even restlessness has grace, Eve Clare was thirty-five, and though she looked neither less nor more than her age it was natural to speak of her as if she were astonishingly youthful looking. She had a small head that she carried high, with hair of a shining fairness, tinged with copper, cut so that it made the most of her head’s subtle modelling. Her skin had a golden, sun-toasted freshness; her eyes were light blue under narrow, curved brows; her mouth was broad, sensitive and egotistical. She was very unsuitably dressed for a murder in a pale green linen dress with scarcely any back to it and had gaily coloured beach sandals on her slim, brown, stockingless feet.
    She would have started the story standing there in the doorway with half a dozen people clustering behind her had not the inspector, glancing round, interrupted with a peremptory request to be taken straight to the body.
    â€œVery well,” said Eve, “Charlie can show you.” She grasped by the wrist the young man who stood beside her. “This is Doctor Widdison, Inspector, who’s the only one of us who’s actually seen her. He must take you up. Come along, it’s this way.” She started a few steps down the paved path that ran along the front of the house.
    The inspector stopped her. He was a compact, brooding man with an assumed decisiveness of speech and action.
    â€œDo I understand,” he said in his firm, cold voice to Charlie Widdison, “that it’s impossible to get into the room except by the window?”
    The young man said: “Er, yes.” A fluting voice and a habit of hesitation gave his speech a disturbing preciousness. “I climbed up by the—balcony. It’s quite easy. But I left the door locked and came down the same way because I—thought it was the right thing to do. I mean, I left everything as I—found it.” Though his rather beautiful face was exceedingly pale and his hands, long and elegantly bony like the rest of him, fidgeted wildly with a coat button his large brown eyes had an odd look of eagerness.
    This look, in different degrees, was to be seen on the faces of all who were listening from the doorway.
    â€œWhat made you go up?” said the inspector.
    The young doctor answered a different question. “You mustn’t take me too—seriously, and I’m aware, of course, that on the very short inspection I made of things I’m not qualified to give an authoritative—opinion. But I think, you see, it’s strychnine.”
    â€œWhat made you go up?”
    â€œStrychnine, you see, is a thing that——”
    â€œWhat made you go up?”
    A woman’s voice in the doorway said on a note of nervous laughter: “I wonder if he always asks every question three times.”
    Eve Clare said: “I asked him to go up, Inspector.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause,” she replied, her voice growing vicious, “all the people whose clothes don’t matter as