She Died a Lady Read Free Page A

Let me help you into a chair.’
    ‘Confound it, sir, I’m not as doddering as all that!’
    ‘No, but you’ve got to be careful of that heart,’ said my serious-minded son. ‘All the same,’ he added, whacking shut the catch of his medicine-case, ‘it beats me how people can carry on like that and think they’re not noticed. That woman has completely lost her head.’
    ‘What’s … being said?’
    ‘Oh, that Mrs Wainright is an evil woman leading on an innocent young man.’ Tom shook his head, drew himself up, and prepared to lecture. ‘That’s medically and biologically unsound, by the way. You see –’
    ‘I am sufficiently acquainted with the facts of life, young man. Your presence in this world testifies to that. So he gets all the sympathy, then?’
    ‘If you could call it sympathy, yes.’
    ‘What’s this Barry Sullivan like? Do you know?’
    ‘I haven’t met him, but they say he’s a decent sort. Free spender; typical Yank; that kind of thing. All the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if he and Mrs Wainright got together and murdered the old man.’
    Tom delivered this statement with a wise and portentous air. He didn’t believe it himself; it was just his way of airing knowledge, or fancied knowledge; but it struck so sharply and unpleasantly in line with my own thoughts that I reacted as fathers will.
    ‘Nonsense!’ I said.
    Tom teetered back on his heels.
    ‘You think so?’ he said grandly. ‘Look at Thompson and Bywaters. Look at Rattenbury and Stoner. Look at … well, there must be a lot of them. A married woman approaching middle age falls for a mere youngster.’
    ‘Who are you to be talking about mere youngsters? You’re only thirty-five yourself.’
    ‘And what do they do?’ inquired Tom. ‘They don’t do anything sensible, like getting a divorce. No. They go scatty and kill the husband. It happens in nine cases out of ten; but don’t ask me why it happens.’
    (Talk to one of them, my lad; see the nerves shake and the brain dither and the self-control dissolve; then perhaps you’ll understand.)
    ‘But I can’t stand here gassing,’ pursued Tom, stamping his feet on the floor, and picking up the medicine-case. He is large and broad and sandy-haired, as I was at his age. ‘Got an interesting case out Exmoor way.’
    ‘It must be something special, if you call it interesting.’
    Tom grinned.
    ‘It’s not the case. It’s the personality. Old boy named Merrivale, Sir Henry Merrivale. He’s staying with Paul Ferrars at Ridd Farm.’
    What’s wrong with him?’
    ‘He fractured his big toe. He was up to some shenanigans – can’t imagine what – and he fractured his big toe. It’s worth going out there just to hear his language. I’m going to keep him in a wheel-chair for six weeks. But if you are interested in Mrs Wainright’s latest escapade …’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘Right. I’ll see if I can pump Paul Ferrars. Discreetly, of course. He must know her pretty well; he painted her picture a year or so ago.’
    But I forbade this as unethical, and preached Tom quite a lecture about it. So I waited for over a month, while the world continued to clatter round our ears and people talked of little but Adolf Hitler. Barry Sullivan, I learned, had gone back to London. I drove out once to see Rita and Alec, but the maid said they were at Minehead. Then, on that overcast Saturday morning, I met Alec.
    Anybody would have been shocked at the change in him. I met him on the cliff-road, between Lyncombe and ‘Mon Repos’. He was stumping along slowly and aimlessly, his hands clasped behind his back; even at a distance you could see him shaking his head from side to side. He wore no hat; the wind ruffled his sparse greyish hair and flapped back his old alpaca coat.
    Though shortish in figure, Alec Wainright used to have a thick breadth of shoulder. Now he seemed to have shrunk. His square, blunt-featured face, with the kindly expression and grey eyes under tufted eyebrows, had