The Unexpected Guest Read Free

attractive man to women.'
    She looked up suddenly, seeming to be aware of Starkwedder for the first time. Returning her gaze, he lit her cigarette with his lighter, and then his own. 'Go on,' he urged her.
    'We married soon after we met,' Laura continued. 'Then, two years later, he had a terrible accident - he was mauled by a lion. He was lucky to escape alive, but he's been a semi-cripple ever since, unable to walk properly.' She leaned back, apparently more relaxed, and Starkwedder moved to a footstool, facing her.
    Laura took a puff at her cigarette and then exhaled the smoke. 'They say misfortune improves your character,' she said. 'It didn't improve his. Instead, it developed all his bad points. Vindictiveness, a streak of sadism, drinking too much. He made life pretty impossible for everyone in this house, and we all put up with it because - oh, you know what one says. “So sad for poor Richard being an invalid.” We shouldn't have put up with it, of course. I see that, now. It simply encouraged him to feel that he was different from other people, and that he could do as he chose without being called to account for it.'
    She rose and went across to the table by the armchair to flick ash in the ashtray. 'All his life,' she continued, 'shooting had been the thing Richard liked doing best. So, when we came to live in this house, every night after everyone else had gone to bed, he'd sit here' - she gestured towards the wheelchair - 'and Angell, his - well, valet and general factotum I suppose you'd call him - Angell would bring the brandy and one of Richard's guns, and put them beside him. Then he'd have the french windows wide open, and he'd sit in here looking out, watching for the gleam of a cat's eyes, or a stray rabbit, or a dog for that matter. Of course, there haven't been so many rabbits lately. That disease - what d'you call it? - mixymatosis or whatever - has been killing them off. But he shot quite a lot of cats.' She took a drag on her cigarette. 'He shot them in the daytime, too. And birds.'
    'Didn't the neighbours ever complain?' Starkwedder asked her.
    'Oh, of course they did,' Laura replied as she returned to sit on the sofa. 'We've only lived here for a couple of years, you know. Before that, we lived on the east coast, in Norfolk. One or two household pets were victims of Richard's there, and we had a lot of complaints. That's really why we came to live here. It's very isolated, this house. We've only got one neighbour for miles around. But there are plenty of squirrels and birds and stray cats.'
    She paused for a moment, and then continued. 'The main trouble in Norfolk was really because a woman came to call at the house one day, collecting subscriptions for the village fete. Richard sent shots to the right and left of her as she was going away, walking down the drive. She bolted like a hare, he said. He roared with laughter when he told us about it. I remember him saying her fat backside was quivering like a jelly. But she went to the police about it, and there was a terrible row.'
    'I can well imagine that,' was Starkwedder's dry comment.
    'But Richard got away with it all right,' Laura told him. 'He had a permit for all his firearms, of course, and he assured the police that he only used them to shoot rabbits. He explained away poor Miss Butterfield by claiming that she was just a nervous old maid who imagined he was shooting at her, which he swore he would never have done. Richard was always plausible. He had no trouble making the police believe him.'
    Starkwedder got up from his footstool and went across to Richard Warwick's body. 'Your husband seems to have had a rather perverted sense of humour,' he observed tardy. He looked down at the table beside the wheelchair. 'I see what you mean,' he continued. 'So a gun by his side was a nightly routine. But surely he couldn't have expected to shoot anything tonight. Not in this fog.'
    'Oh, he always had a gun put there,' replied Laura. 'Every night. It