Dorothy Eden (20 page)

Jeremy appeared briefly at Cressida’s door.

“I’m terribly sorry, I went to sleep. I should have been out of here before daylight.”

“I shouldn’t think in this house it matters what happens,” Cressida said. She still felt gay and light-hearted, last night’s events a mere fantasy that did not exist by daylight.

“Nothing did happen,” Jeremy said, somewhat cryptically. “There’s a letter from Tom. Do you want it now?”

“Not until after breakfast.”

“Wise girl. Save your strength.”

“What for?”

“To say no.”

Cressida knew she should be angry with him—a wakeful night seemed to have increased his impudence—but it was so pleasant to be light-hearted, to forget her fears and perplexities, and behave as if it were quite normal for a young man with a mocking face and dark, untidy hair to be looking in her bedroom door. Last night he had talked of Paris, she remembered. And last night, from fear or relief, or simply the unexpected opportunity, he had kissed her…

“I’m going now,” he said. “I shall expect you to dinner, and then a sitting for me tonight.”

Tonight—was life going on as normally as that? Cressida thought of Arabia stubbornly locked in her room, of the constant mysterious happenings, of Jeremy’s own fears for her safety last night. But, after all, what could happen today? She would be safely working in Mr. Mullins’s shop, she would have lunch at the cafe round the corner, she would not visit churches or cemeteries or do anything at all that may be distressing or unsafe. She would even come home before dark. Today she would leave Lucy’s story strictly alone. Like Arabia, she would play the ostrich game of putting her head in the sand.

That way, what was there to stop her from eating dinner with Jeremy in the basement room that was becoming a familiar refuge?

“All right,” she said. “I’ll come.”

Before she left for work, however, she ran upstairs and tapped at Arabia’s door. Arabia surely could not still be indulging in the whim that led her to lock herself in her room.

“Who is it?” Once more there was the cautious query.

“It’s Cressida again. Please open the door. I want to say thank you for the lovely party last night.”

“That’s all right, my dear. I’m glad you liked it.” The voice was infinitely weary. At last it sounded its seventy-five years and more.

“Arabia, are you ill?”

“No, dear. Only very tired.”

“But why have you locked your door?”

“Because it’s safer, of course.” Arabia’s voice was suddenly tart, as if she were impatient with the slowness of Cressida’s perception.

“Arabia—aren’t you imagining something? No one’s going to hurt you. After all—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the old lady retorted, with something of her former fire and vitality. “Oh I hate this house, I hate it! If only I hid a camel, sand dunes, the desert wind, oh, I’d ride for dear life…” Her voice died away as she moved from the door and out of hearing.

Cressida turned away slowly. She encountered Miss Glory with a breakfast tray on the stairs.

“Oh, Miss Glory, what’s the matter with Mrs. Bolton?” she cried.

“She’s afraid she’s going to be poisoned, that’s all.” The answer, in Miss Glory’s matter-of-fact voice, seemed all the more shocking.

“Poisoned! But that’s absurd! Why, she herself—”

“Absurd or not, she makes me sit down and taste everything first,” Miss Glory interrupted. “It doesn’t matter if I die. Frankly, I don’t care one way or the other.”

She went on her gloomy way, rapped at the door, called briefly, “It’s me,” and then disappeared through the narrow space of the reluctantly opened door.

The door closed again and Cressida heard the key click in the lock.

Only one other strange thing happened before Cressida left for work. That was the spectacle of Mr. Moretti, in his dressing-gown, appearing in the passage and calling querulously, “Rosebud! Have you forgotten me this morning? Where are you, Rosebud, my own?”

But Miss Glory was upstairs with Arabia, and out of hearing. The extraordinary thing was that she should have neglected Mr. Moretti for Arabia. On other mornings Mr. Moretti had been attended to first, without fail. Did that mean she was genuinely concerned about Arabia’s behaviour, or was it that she was suddenly displeased with her flirtatious suitor? Cressida could not imagine the latter happening. Miss Glory’s infatuation had been too deep for displeasure.

No one had mentioned her fall the previous evening. It came as a surprise when Mr. Mullins asked her why she was limping.

“Oh, was I? I didn’t realise. I slipped on the stairs last night and hurt my knee. It’s nothing, really.”

“How did you come to slip?” Was Mr. Mullins’s voice expressing nothing but polite concern, or did he think it odd and suspicious that she should have had a fall?

Now she was beginning to read significance into the most innocent things. Nothing could be more kind and innocent that Mr. Mullins’s bland, pink face and gently concerned eyes.

“We all went out to see what Mimosa was doing, and the lights weren’t on, and I slipped,” she said quickly.

Before Mr. Mullins could comment on that statement she said on an impulse, “Mr. Mullins, do you think Arabia is mad?”

“No,” he said at once.

“But you don’t know all the odd things she has been doing lately. After all, putting that advertisement in the paper was eccentric enough.”

“That was nothing but a bold, if rather foolish, bid for a little belated happiness. Which I may say she deserves.”

“I know she does, but if I told you she was locked in her room at this moment by her own hand, would you still say she wasn’t mad?”

“I would know that whatever Arabia chose to do, she had very sound reasons. She is a wonderful and extraordinary woman. Didn’t I tell you that?” Mr. Mullins came as near to glaring as his mild, kindly countenance would permit. Cressida found herself laughing, and her tension lessened. Perhaps it was just another of Arabia’s dramatic pranks, in keeping with her secrecy and her love of melodrama.

Nevertheless, when, later in the day, the telephone message came, Mr. Mullins was the first to urge her to hurry home at once. He had taken the message himself. He said, “Someone is ringing to say that Mimosa is locked in your room, and that you are the only person with a key.”

“Mimosa!” Cressida exclaimed. “Oh, he must have got shut in this morning after last night. Jeremy and he spent the night—” She blushed suddenly, aware of what she was saying. “I mean, Jeremy had an extraordinary idea that he should keep an eye on me, after that fall on the stairs, so instead of letting him spend the night on my doorstep I suggested he should sit in the living-room. Mimosa was there, too, and went to sleep on the couch. I remember seeing him there this morning. Oh, how idiotic of me to lock him in.”

“You don’t think he could wait now until closing time?” Mr. Mullins suggested.

“Normally, yes, but the other day he was in my room half-poisoned, and last night there was the tin tied to his tail. You don’t know, Mr. Mullins! I think there must be a poltergeist or something. And Jeremy so dotes on him.”

Mr. Mullins permitted himself a twinkle.

“Then of course he must be rescued immediately. Run along. And since it’s quiet this afternoon there doesn’t seem much point in your coming back. Keep an eye on Arabia, or make tea for that doting young man.”

“Mr. Mullins, you are a darling. I adore you,” said Cressida, and flew for her hat and coat.

But when she unlocked the door of her room and went in, there was no sign of Mimosa. She called to him and looked under the couch and the bed. But there was no large, sun-flower-coloured cat, no sudden playful spring, no indignant wail. Who had sent that urgent message, she suddenly wondered. Mr. Mullins had omitted to tell her to whom he had spoken. She had assumed it had been Jeremy, but now she wasn’t sure, for surely Jeremy would have been awaiting her arrival. There was no one about, and no sound in the house.

She was about to leave the room and go and call Jeremy when she noticed that one door of the big wardrobe in her bedroom was open. Surely she hadn’t left it open that morning. And what were all those clothes hanging inside? They were not hers, and neither had they been there before. She had had no more than a suit and a cocktail dress to hang in the wardrobe. They had looked very meagre in the cavernous space, and she had kept the doors firmly shut on the poverty of her wardrobe.

But now there were coloured dresses, a beaver coat, a dark grey suit hanging ostentatiously within. Bewildered, she went over to investigate.

A faint musty scent met her nostrils as she leaned inside the dim space. It was a scent composed of camphor and potpourri. Dead roses, she thought, her brain beginning to whirl. And these dresses were of a style dating back to the nineteen-thirties. Lucy’s, she thought in a flash, as she fingered a tarnished silver brocade. And then she had time to think no more, for a strong push from behind sent her suddenly headlong into the farther wall, and darkness came down on her—a musty sweet-smelling darkness shot through faintly with lights as her head throbbed.

The doors had been shut on her.

Now she could not control her panic. Fighting her way upright, among the enveloping clothes, the beaver coat threatening to smother her, she beat on the heavy doors.

“Let me out! Whoever is there! Let me out!”

There was no sound at all. The person who must have been hiding behind the open wardrobe door, anticipating her interest in the unexpected discovery of the clothes, must have pushed her in and slammed the doors in one skilful movement, and now had crept away silently leaving her to suffocate.

No, whoever it was had not gone. Cressida could hear heavy breathing, as of someone leaning against the door listening to her pleas. Listening and laughing, no doubt, with a horrible humourless mirth.

That breathing! Where had she heard it before? She remembered now. It was the sound Arabia had made on the other side of her locked door this morning. The laboured sound of age and deep emotion.

“Arabia!” she sobbed. “It is you! Let me out, please. This is such an absurd game to play.”

There was a momentary silence, then a deep hoarse chuckle from without. Cressida beat on the doors. Already she was growing uncomfortably hot, the perspiration starting out on her forehead.

“Arabia! I’ll die in here, among Lucy’s clothes. You don’t mean me to die, do you? You said you loved me.”

There was a faint shuffling sound, then the hoarse whispered voice.

“You should have gone away as I told you to. What right had you to come here stealing Lucy’s life? Usurper!” The dramatic word was spat out. But there was more.

“Stay there and die,” said the malevolent voice.

And then the shuffling sound moved away, farther and farther.

“Arabia!” screamed Cressida in an agony of horror and panic.

There was no answer. The old lady was gone out of hearing. She was alone in the airless darkness, suffocated with the musty odour of a dead girl’s clothes.

But there must be someone in the house who would hear her calling and knocking. Miss Glory, Mrs. Stanhope, Jeremy. After his faithful watchdog act last night, surely Jeremy was not far away.

But he thought she was safely at work. He had probably gone out. He would be investigating to see whether Lucy’s death were registered under the name of Meredith. Lucy, dearly loved wife of Larry Meredith. Poor Lucy who had no grave, because a crazy old woman would not admit she was dead…

“Jeremy! Mrs. Stanhope! Miss Glory!”

Miss Glory would be out doing the daily shopping, Mrs. Stanhope probably resting in her room that was too far for Cressida’s voice to reach it. The inquisitive Dawson who loved murders and foul play would be at work. Oh, Arabia, for all her craziness, had chosen a shrewd time to play this last and most diabolical trick.

It must have been Arabia who had telephoned Mr. Mullins, and he, foolish besotted innocent, had not suspected her story. Neither had Cressida suspected it. The trail had been too well laid. Mimosa had been in danger twice and could so easily have been for a third time.

Was she to die for the sake of a skittish cat who looked like a sunflower?”

“Please, please! Someone let me out!”

She was sobbing and growing faint. The stale perfume of roses was overpowering.

The silk brushing her cheek—to what long-ago ball had Lucy worn it, what ghostly echoes of laughter and music did it hold? These furs, how had they muffled Lucy’s slender body and framed her little face which looked out like a rose? How could she have wanted to steal Lucy’s life, that held so many unhappy secrets—the perhaps unwilling marriage to Larry (yes, that must have been it, Lucy had married him unwillingly), the desperate cry to her lover,
“Darling, darling, darling…”
the pathetically unwanted baby that was destined never to be born.

And now another tragedy was to be added to Lucy’s—Cressida’s ignominious death in a suffocating darkness, smothered with the dead girl’s clothes.

Almost she was growing peaceful about it. Drowsiness was slipping over her. If she died no one would grieve too much. Jeremy, perhaps, for the face he would never now put on to canvas, for the kiss he would never finish. Tom—oh, she had forgotten to read Tom’s letter this morning. Poor Tom! She had treated him with as little understanding as he had her. She could not have made him happy, she knew now. Nevertheless, it would distress him deeply to learn that she had died in such an extraordinary way. He would feel that it was another embarrassing slight to his dignity.

He would say, “Poor little one—” No, it would be Jeremy who would say that. “What a charming little upside-down face—surrounded with all that fur and ball dresses—on such a hot day—”

In her growing detachment from her surroundings, Cressida thought she could hear music. But it was not for her. It was for Lucy who was going to a ball. The violins were playing.

From a rumba to a requiem…

The words, coming sharply into her mind, roused her from her growing lethargy. She was not going to die at all! That was Mr. Moretti’s violin she could hear. He was in his room down the hall. He must hear her if she called. He must!