Speedy Death Read Free Page A

‘You are too hefty for my strength to support you. I know it’s a shock, but there it is, and we have to face it. That’s Mountjoy all right, and I shouldn’t tell your sister.’
    ‘Tell—my—sister?’ said Garde, like a man in a dream. ‘But she’ll have to know.’
    ‘About the death of Mountjoy, yes,’ said Carstairs, puzzled at the sudden collapse of the young man. ‘The fact that Mountjoy was a woman, no!’
    ‘I—yes, I get you. Rather bad luck to find out that the chap you are engaged to is a woman, what?’
    He began to giggle helplessly.
    ‘Go and pull the plug out of the bath, and stop being a fool,’ said Carstairs sharply.
    The little group downstairs, mute and becoming more and more uneasy as the time slipped by, were still waiting and waiting as though for something to happen.
    It happened. The door swung suddenly and, asusual in that well-run house, noiselessly open, and Garde walked in. His face was pale. It was damp with cold perspiration.
    ‘He’s dead,’ he said, in a queer, staccato voice.
    ‘Who?’
    It was Mrs Bradley speaking.
    ‘Why, Mountjoy, of course. That’s why he didn’t come down to dinner. He couldn’t. He was—well, he was dead, you see. Drowned. Drowned in the bath.’
    At any less serious news Dorothy would have been compelled to laugh. She wanted to laugh now, but it would have been the laughter of hysteria, not of mirth. She knew her fiancé fairly well, and she realized, with a cold feeling round her heart, that this was not the way he would bring tidings of natural death.
    ‘Garde!’ Her voice, harsh and uncontrolled because of this terrible hysteria that she was fighting, rose shrilly upon the tense silence. ‘Garde! What do you mean? He can’t be—dead!’
    ‘I mean what I say,’ said the young man, turning his gloomy gaze upon Mrs Bradley. ‘And there’s been some funny work in this house tonight. Mountjoy was dead before any of us came down to dinner this evening. Got that? Before we came down to dinner.’
    ‘But look here——’ began Bertie Philipson feebly.
    ‘Can’t stop,’ replied Garde, cutting him short with brutal directness. ‘Doctor will be here any minute, I hope, and I must take him upstairs. Not that hecan do anything. Poor devil’s as dead as a doornail. Yes, he’s dead. Drowned, you know.’
    As abruptly as he had entered, he took his departure, slamming the door behind him with such force that those at the table involuntarily started from their seats.
    Calm as the setting sun which was glorifying the west, Eleanor ‘collected eyes’.
    ‘I think we might repair to the drawing-room now,’ she remarked quietly.
    Even Mrs Bradley looked astonished.

Chapter Two
Accident? Suicide? Murder?
    ‘OF COURSE, IT’S rotten for the Bing crowd.’ It was Bertie Philipson who spoke, as he lounged gracefully against one of the wooden posts of the verandah next morning after breakfast.
    Mrs Lestrange Bradley nodded. ‘And most annoying for us,’ she added succinctly.
    Bertie, who had been attempting to close his eyes to this view of the matter, was compelled to agree with her.
    ‘Dashed annoying,’ he said. ‘Still, what can one do? It is a great pity Carstairs dragged in
that
aspect of the thing at all, especially as it is bound to be incorrect. Of course, the whole thing was the result of an accident.’
    ‘But was it?’ asked Mrs Bradley, with grave earnestness. Her eyes sombrely sought his, and, in spite of the young man’s obvious discomfort and embarrassment, held them implacably.
    ‘What—what do you mean?’ he asked.
    ‘This,’ said Mrs Lestrange Bradley. ‘Or rather, these. And they want explaining.’
    ‘Just a moment,’ said Bertie, at last managing to avert his eyes. ‘Here comes Carstairs.’
    Carstairs approached them along the gravel path, and mounted the white wooden steps.
    ‘Ah, Philipson,’ he said, ‘you here? And Mrs Bradley?’
    ‘Good morning, Mr Carstairs.’
    Mrs Bradley smiled a