The March Hare Murders

Elizabeth Ferrars was one of the most distinguished crime writers of her generation. She was described by
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
as ‘The writer who may be the closest of all to Christie in style, plotting and general milieu’. Born in 1907 in Rangoon, Burma, the author grew up in Hampshire, England, before studying journalism in London. Her first crime novel,
Give a Corpse a Bad Name
, was published in 1940. During her career, she wrote more than seventy novels and became immensely popular in America, where she was published as E.X. Ferrars. In 1953, she became a founding member of the British Crime Writers’ Association and, in the early 1980s, was awarded its Silver Dagger for a lifetime’s achievement. She died in 1995.

ELIZABETH FERRARS

THE LANGTAIL PRESS

L
ONDON

This edition published 2010 by

The Langtail Press

www.langtailpress.com

First Published 1949

The March Hare Murders © 1949 by Peter Mactaggart

ISBN 978-1-78002-031-0

F
IRST A SHADOW
fell across the threshold and remained motionless. It was as if the man outside whose shadow it was, were listening for voices from within the room. Then he moved, but his footsteps were almost without sound. Only the glass door creaked as he pushed it further open.

As his short body filled the entrance, cutting off most of the sunlight, David Obeney, who had been half-asleep in a chair by the empty fireplace, opened his eyes and found himself looking into the face of the only man he had ever consciously desired to murder.

David could make nothing of it. He could think of no reason why that man should be there, and for an instant, in his astonishment, his mind rocked with terror. He thought it must be his mind itself that had created the image, reaching back into deadened, half-forgotten hatreds to shock him into realisation of some present horror.

But it was months since his mind had played that trick on him. His mind had stopped playing tricks. It was tired and strangely emotionless, but it had allowed the world around him to become the normal and familiar world again.

Yet, as the man stayed there, as he did not move, as he did not disappear, David’s fingers started to dig wildly into the cushioned arms of his chair and his whole body to shake.

“Oh, dear me, I do beg your pardon,” the man said. “I fear I startled you.”

The voice was the voice that David remembered, light and feminine. It brought back a whole world of hatred.

“I just dropped in to telephone,” the man said. “We haven’t any telephone at the cottage. You’re Stella’s brother, aren’t you?”

David could make no sense of it at all.

As he stared, the man went on. “I’m so sorry I disturbed you. I’d never have walked in like that if I’d known you’d be here. But Stella always lets us use the telephone.”

David had managed to pull himself upright in the chair. It seemed that the man had not recognised him, yet somehow knew that he was Stella’s brother. But how had it come about that the man knew Stella?

“I’m sorry. … I was asleep. … I didn’t hear you come,” David said.

“Tired after your long journey, I expect.”

So he knows all about me, David thought. He knows where I’ve come from, he knows what the place was, he knows what I was doing there. He probably knows what drove me there in the first place, or what’s supposed to have been the cause of it all. He knows everything, as he always used to know everything.

Yet still it seemed to David that the man did not know him, that all he knew was that he was Stella’s brother.

He got to his feet. “Telephone’s over there,” he said. “Go ahead. Sorry I was asleep.” He started towards the door.

“Oh, please don’t go—please,” the man said. “Please sit down again. I won’t be a minute and it’s nothing of any importance. I should simply hate it if you were disturbed on my account.”

There was urgency in his voice. Standing still in the middle of the room, David started to look at him more deliberately.

Now that he came to think of it, he was surprised that he had recognised the man so quickly, for there had been great changes. Hair that had been chestnut was now grey, there was a sagging of thick flesh round the broad chin, skin that had been clear and pink and blooming was now red with a redness of interlacing veins, the squat, heavy body had sagged and thickened and the woollen pullover contained a paunch. But eyes don’t change. Eyes can stay light blue and coldly kind and evil.

“Well, go ahead,” David said and walked uncertainly back to his chair. “Stella’s getting tea, I think. She went out. She said she was going to get tea.”

“Ah, then you’ve only just got here?”

“Yes,” David said. “Shall I call her?”

“No, no, please don’t trouble her. She’s so kind about us popping in like this to use the telephone. It’s such a nuisance not having one of our own at the cottage.”

“I suppose so,” David said.

“She’s been the soul of kindness to us since we moved in, you know.”

“Yes, I expect so.” David picked up a box of cigarettes from the mantelpiece. “Cigarette, Professor?”

“No, thank you—no, I stick to a pipe. But, I say …” The pink, soft lips began to smile. “You know me then?”

David smiled back. He took a cigarette for himself and noticed with pleasure as he lit it that his hands were steady. They did not feel quite steady, yet they were; he could see it.

“But we’ve never met, have we?” the man asked with a kind of eagerness. “I can’t recall …”

“Stella told me about your being here,” David lied casually and inside himself began to laugh. He thought, you wanted me to say that every one knows you, that no one who reads a newspaper could help recognising you. But I managed to deprive you of that small joy. “Go ahead and telephone,” he added.

“Ah yes, thank you—thank you.”

The man moved towards the telephone.

As he picked it up and dialled a local number, David laid his cigarette down on an ashtray, took off his spectacles and softly rubbed his eyes. Without his spectacles, his defective vision turned the room around him into a blur, and within this blur he felt concealed and protected.

But his eyes were pricking with a faint pain, and it seemed to him that all of a sudden the room had become very hot and unpleasant. The voice at the telephone seemed more familiar than ever now that all the changes of time were hidden within the blur. There was no longer any need to take ten years away from that red-veined face to achieve the full pang of hateful memory.

“Is that you, my dear? This is me,” the voice was saying coyly. “Me!” As if there could be no other me in the world. “Are you busy? Have I interrupted you? I just had to hear your voice, that’s all. … No, I didn’t ring up about anything in particular. … What? You were working. I
have
interrupted …? Oh, my dear, don’t sound so angry with me, I can’t bear it. I just wanted to hear your voice. There’s no harm in that, is there? You don’t grudge me that. I haven’t been able to work all day myself, and I thought that if we just chatted for a few minutes …Now don’t be so stingey, dear Deirdre. A few minutes of listening to your lovely voice isn’t much to ask, is it? Just so that I can get some work done. …”

It went on. David fumbled in the blur for his cigarette. His fingertips brushed against it and knocked it on to the floor.

Instantly fear of fire possessed him. Stooping, he groped wildly around, pushing on his spectacles as he did so. But even with their help, he could not see where the cigarette had fallen. His hand ran over the rough pile of the carpet and found nothing. He began to think he smelt burning.

The man had put the telephone down.

“There,” he said quietly. “There—just by your foot.”

David moved his foot sharply and found that the cigarette had been hidden beside it.

“Thanks,” he said, feeling furiously ashamed. “I couldn’t see it.”

“By the way,” the man went on, “are you really sure we haven’t met?”

“Sure?” David drew deeply on the cigarette. “Well, I don’t know, of course. One never quite knows.”

“I got an idea just now, seeing you without your glasses, that we’d met before.”

“You did? Well, I don’t know.”

“You looked much younger.”

“I suppose so,” David said.

“But one sees so many people and so many of them resemble each other. Has that ever struck you? Women especially. There are only a few well-defined types among women. But anyway, I’ll be seeing you again soon, I hope. You must make Stella and Ferdie bring you along to the cottage some evening. Or come yourself. Any time. Borrow books any time, if you want to. Any time.”

He held out a hand. As David took it, he found that the feel of it was the most familiar thing of all, the small, hard, dry hand that held too closely, too graspingly.

•   •   •   •   •

A few minutes after the man had gone, Stella came in with the tea-tray. She set it down on a small table and sat down beside it. She was looking rather beautiful these days; marriage had suited her. She had acquired a quality of grace and definiteness that she had not had before, and she dressed more strikingly too. To-day she had on a dress of emerald green linen, tightly belted, and with it wore a heavy, brassy necklace. As a young girl she had been pale and shy and somewhat ineffective; it had seemed almost surprising that Ferdie Pratt should have fallen in love with her. But now her shyness had been resolved into a slightly tense assurance that had its own attraction, and her pallor and fairness had taken on a kind of brilliance.

Pouring out the tea, she said, “Have you been asleep? You look like it.”

“No, I don’t think so,” David said, “though I had a foul dream. In God’s name, Stella, what’s that old devil Verinder doing here?”

“Verinder?” Her hand, with the silver teapot in it, checked above the teacups. “Has he been here?”

“Yes, he came in here to use the telephone. But what’s he doing here?”

“Why didn’t you call me?” Stella asked.

“He told me not to. He—”

“Why didn’t you?” Stella interrupted.

“He told me not to trouble you,” David said. “But what’s he doing here, wandering in like that to use your telephone?”

She set the teapot down. She kept her eyes upon it and her eyelids lowered.

“He lives at Bell Cottage,” she said, making it sound as if she wanted that piece of information to put an end to the subject.

“Where’s that?” David asked.

“Just across the lane. It’s only a sort of week-end place, of course, but he’s there quite often—he and Ingrid. D’you still take two lumps of sugar, David?”

“Yes, please. Who’s Ingrid?”

“His wife.”

“You mean Verinder’s
married?”

“Oh yes, didn’t you know? There was quite a lot about it in the papers. They got married secretly, to avoid publicity, but then it got out somehow. I think it was about a year ago.”

“I wasn’t taking much interest in newspapers just then.” David reached for his cup. “It gave me a bad shock when he walked in. For a moment I didn’t quite believe in him. By the way, who’s Deirdre?”

“Deirdre?” Stella’s eyelids lifted. She looked at him. “Why?”

“Because he seemed very anxious that I should stay and hear him telephone to her. The old exhibitionist.”

“He was telephoning to Deirdre?” Stella asked.

“That’s what he called her. And he liked having an audience. He wanted me to hear him purring away at some woman or other. He hasn’t changed.”

Stella’s cheeks had been reddening. She reached for a plate of small sandwiches and held it out to David.

“I’m sorry there’s nothing much for tea,” she said. “I’d no sugar to spare for a cake. But I didn’t really realise you knew Verinder, David. I knew you’d been a student of his, but I didn’t realise you knew anything much about him.”

“Oh, I knew him,” David said.

“But why d’you dislike him so much?”

“I’ll tell you sometime, perhaps.”

“But did you really know him, or just his reputation?”

“I really knew him. But luckily he didn’t seem to recognise me just now. Yet he knew I was your brother.”

“Well, of course we’d told him about you—that you were coming here for a time to rest and about your accident and so on.”

“Oh—and so on.”

“D’you mind about that?” Stella asked.

“That he knows I’ve been in a so-called mental home? No. … It’s something I’ve got to get used to.” Yet he minded with fury, with sick loathing, and for a moment a desperate anger against Stella for this betrayal crawled in his blood. He looked away from her towards the open glass doors and the sunlit garden beyond them. “But in that case,” he went on, “why didn’t he know me? Obeney isn’t a common name. You’d think he’d remember it.”

“Perhaps I never mentioned it,” Stella said. “I may just have called you David, or my brother—though I’m sure I told Ingrid sometime. But I don’t really know. David—I’m sorry I spoke to Verinder about you, if you mind. You see, when all that happened, and when you wouldn’t let me or any one come to see you, I felt I had to talk about it to someone who knew about things like that. And Verinder knows an awful lot. And he’s very sensible and sympathetic. And kind, really.”