Speedy Death Read Free

of second sight,’ remarked Dorothy. ‘I remember a friend of my father had it. He knew when people were going to die. It was rather horrible.’
    Mrs Bradley smiled to herself in a sinister manner, but offered no contribution to the conversation. Apparently the natural gifts of the Scots people had no particular interest for her.
    The talk languished, and presently died. The atmosphere became charged with tension. It was as though all the persons, not only in that room, but in the whole house, were holding their breaths, waiting for something to happen. The silence weighed upon all their spirits, and they sat, an uncomfortably silent group, straining their ears to catch any sound which might indicate what was going on upstairs.
    ‘Sounds quiet enough. I do hope he isn’t ill,’ said young Philipson, breaking the silence at last, and shifting uneasily in his chair.
    Dorothy moved her slim shoulders as though they chafed beneath an unaccustomed burden.
    ‘I expect it is all a false alarm, but I think Father might send to tell us so,’ observed Eleanor in her precise voice. ‘Oh, dear, what is that banging noise?’
    Above stairs, a vigorous hammering on the panels of the bathroom door was eliciting no reply from the occupant.
    ‘May have fainted,’ suggested Garde. ‘Vote we break in. Heard of people being drowned through fainting in the bath. Silly blighters have weak hearts, and the hot water does them in. I’ll get a chair and smash the panels of the door.’
    It was as he returned with a stout chair that Carstairs appeared from below. Garde stepped forward and rammed the heavy wooden chair with violence against the bathroom door.
    ‘Half a moment!’ cried the scientist. ‘We might as well try the lock first.’
    He turned the handle, and, to their surprise, the door opened.
    ‘Well, I’m damned!’ shouted Garde, who, in his capacity as a student of medicine, had bounded in before the older men. ‘It’s a woman. I say! She’s dead!’
    ‘A doctor! A doctor!’ cried his father. ‘I’ll telephone. Get the poor creature out of there. Puther in Mountjoy’s room for now. Oh—and where the devil is Mountjoy then?’
    Without staying for an answer, he bounded with considerable swiftness and agility down the stairs to the hall telephone to call up the doctor, whose skill, in this case, would be unavailing, for, to Garde Bing’s already practised eye, there was no doubt that the thin, wet body they lifted out of the bath was a dead body.
    He and Carstairs made prolonged and gallant attempts at artificial respiration, but their efforts were vain.
    ‘Hopeless,’ said Carstairs, straightening himself.
    Garde, seated on the edge of the bed in the room where they had taken the dead woman, shook his head gloomily.
    ‘No doubt about it,’ he agreed. ‘Better go down again, I suppose.’
    As the young man turned to follow his father down the staircase, Carstairs laid ahand on his arm.
    ‘Just one moment, my boy,’ he said, and paused.
    ‘Feeling seedy?’ asked the young man sympathetically. ‘Beastly things, corpses. We get used to them, though, up at the hospitals, you know. Let’s have a brandy, shall we? Soon put you right. Weird business, though, isn’t it? What the devil was she doing, having a bath in our house? And who is she? And how did she get in? And, oh, a devil of a lot of other things.’
    ‘Such as?’ prompted Carstairs quickly.
    ‘Oh, such as the bathroom window being wideopen top and bottom, and the door being unlocked. And that chap Mountjoy—couldn’t stick that mealy-mouthed blighter, somehow—but where is he?’
    ‘Dead,’ replied Carstairs calmly. He pointed to the bedroom in which the dead woman lay.
    ‘In there,’ he concluded.
    Garde turned white. His knees felt as though they had turned to water. He held on to the banisters for support.
    ‘In—in—what do you say?’ he stammered weakly.
    Carstairs gripped his arm.
    ‘Hold up, old chap,’ he said peremptorily.