Bleeding Hooks Page 17

  “Aren’t you going to kiss Pussy good night?” she had pouted, her eyes seconding the invitation of her lips.

  “No, damn you!” he had shouted. “Go and ask the Major!”

  Well, of course, she was very fond of Piggy, but she couldn’t allow any man to yell at her like that, so she had come upstairs to her bedroom alone, and the tonic she applied to her eyes did not altogether succeed in concealing her tears.

  She smeared her face and neck with cream, and patted imaginary lines with her firm, slim fingers. She took the pins out of her hair, and brushed its rather thin, brittle ends, until they stood out in a fuzzy halo round her head, then she plaited it, and tied the ends with washed-out pink ribbons. She rubbed the bruises on her arms, then dabbed at her face and eyes with pink tissues. Her face, without its make-up, looked peaked and sallow, the bones of her cheeks looking too prominent without the pink softness of rouge.

  She slid her wide, black trousers into a sleek, satin heap on to the floor, shed her white scanties and shoes, stepped into green silk pyjamas, and went to sleep with her head on a wet pillow, wondering vaguely whether Piggy meant what he had said about strangling her.

  A strange, sharp noise awakened her, and she sat upright in bed.

  The thought uppermost in her mind was that Piggy had got over his temper, and was trying to attract her attention with the curlew’s cry which he had adopted as his theme song. He usually went out and walked off an ill-humour; perhaps he was standing beneath her window, throwing up pebbles. This had no sooner occurred to her than she was out of bed, tearing at the thick curtains, so that the moonlight streamed into the dark room as if glad to be released.

  No light came from the lower windows of the hotel. She peered along the street which led to the little graveyard where Mrs. Mumsby lay so silently. There was no sign of Gunn.

  Disappointed, she drew back from the window, and as she stood thus silhouetted against the light, she heard a voice say, “Don’t move!”

  At the sound, her heart beat so suffocatingly against her breast that she could not utter the scream that came to her throat. And so she stood, like a silver statue, till her pride urged her to turn.

  Her quick eyes glimpsed a ghostly head with two hollow gaps for eyes, but before she could call out, she heard a swishing sound, and something cold and sinuous whipped like a lash round her neck, and drew tighter and tighter. She struggled against the relentless pressure while the beat of her heart moved up from her breast and drummed in her ears.

  As she sank into unconsciousness, she heard Gunn’s voice in the distance, saying:

  “Forgive me, darling. I didn’t mean to...”

  Chapter 28

  The first person Mr. Winkley saw when the local connection from the London train drew up at Aberllyn Halt, was Gunn, striding up and down the wooden platform like a caged lion taking exercise.

  “Hallo!” he said. “Where’s Game?”

  Gunn gazed at him blankly.

  “You know that Major Jeans always refers to you and Miss Partridge as ‘Game and Gun’, don’t you?” He smiled, then, seeing that the blank look still remained on Gunn’s face, he said sharply, “What’s happened? Not another?” His raised eyebrows supplied the missing word.

  “No,” replied Gunn, “but there’s been an attempted one, I think. It’s Pussy, this time, and she thinks it’s me. I brought the ‘Iron Lung’ to meet you so that we could go somewhere and talk. Throw your case into the dicky, and hop in.”

  He started the protesting engine, and drove towards the sandhills at a pace which literally made Mr. Winkley’s hair curl. The hood was down, and he had to take off his hat, so that the wind whipped through his long fair hair, and heaped it in a curly mass on top of his head. He rightly guessed, however, that any protest would only cause Gunn to increase the speed, and, knowing that it was barely two miles to the sandhills, he sat in silence.

  “Sorry, and all that,” said Gunn, looking at Mr. Winkley’s hair after he had brought the little two-seater to a squeaking standstill, “but I feel as rattled as this car sounds. It’s a bit thick when the Only Girl in the World accuses you of trying to murder her – accuses me, I mean, of course.”

  “If you could just begin at the beginning,” said Mr. Winkley, in the mild tones which suggested the kindly G.P. asking a nervous patient to describe his symptoms.

  “Sorry,” said Gunn again. “Well, it’s like this. Pussy and I had one hell of a row last night. She’s been playing me against Major Jeans lately, and I was about sick of it. When it got to leg-play under the bridge table last night, I saw red, and told her where she got off. I know she was only teasing me, but, hang it all, I’m in love with her, and there’s a limit. I admit that I said I’d strangle her, and at the time I meant it, but –”

  Mr. Winkley sighed.

  “If you could put it all a little more clearly,” he suggested patiently.

  “That’s all there is to it,” replied Gunn. “I threatened to strangle her, and someone tried to strangle her last night, so she thinks it was me, and she won’t have anything more to do with me.”

  Mr. Winkley at once became alert.

  ’That’s the last thing I expected,” he said. “Have you told anyone in the hotel about it?”

  “No. We’re both too much upset to talk about it. I came straight out after breakfast to meet your train. I’ve been waiting for over three hours. Pussy had breakfast in her room, but she didn’t eat anything. I watched the tray go in, and saw it come out. She was still in her room when I left.”

  “Is anyone with her?”

  “Only her mother.”

  “We’d better get back at once.”

  “Yes, but surely –” began Gunn. “Good God, you don’t think –”

  He took one look at Mr. Winkley’s face, pressed the self-starter, and sent the car hurtling towards the hotel at a speed twice that of the previous journey.

  Constable Thomas Lloyd was standing on his little mat in the centre of the four cross-roads just outside The Fisherman’s Rest. He flung up his hand automatically as the car approached, and all the power of clutch and brake could not check it until it had passed him.

  “What the hell did you pull me up for?” demanded Gunn. “You can see there’s no other car on the road.”

  “Dangerous driving,” returned Lloyd in his most officious manner. “I’ve had my eye on you for some time, sir. There’s a speed limit through this village, indeed.”

  “Oh yes, whateffer,” mocked Gunn. “There’s no sign up, but I suppose you want another conviction to make them up to even numbers.”

  Lloyd puffed himself out like an old bullfrog.

  “Here, here,” he said, “there’s no need to talk like that now.”

  Gunn laughed.

  “Loud cheers!” he said. “Insulting police on point-duty, I suppose. You know my name and address; you can put it in your notebook if it gives you any pleasure. But if you haul me up in court, I shall start asking awkward questions about what you were doing along the lake road on the day that Mrs. Mumsby died, when you ought to have been on point-duty.”

  Lloyd deflated himself, and became more conciliatory.

  “Now, sir,” he began, but Gunn threw in his clutch.

  “Oh, go to hell!” he said savagely. “While you keep me here, there may be murder done!”

  “Murder?” exclaimed Lloyd, stepping back.

  “Murder,” reiterated Gunn.

  He turned the car quickly round the corner, and drew up at the side entrance of the hotel in a cloud of exhaust smoke.

  Lloyd moved slowly back to his mat, and stood there motionless until he was disturbed by the ringing of bicycle bells. Without looking up, he waved his hand, and a crowd of boys from the near-by preparatory school circled round him delightedly three times on their bicycles, before he had noticed what they were doing.

  Chapter 29

  Mr. Winkley walked into the bright bedroom overlooking the road, and was greeted by Pussy, wearing
a green knitted jumper-suit and a rather subdued air. The only indication of her extreme perturbation was the fact that she had omitted to “do” her face, which, in consequence, looked pale and thin, and exhibited a remarkable number of unhealthy little spots which her usual make-up skilfully concealed. Her lips, too, lacking the exotic lipstick, looked thin, and revealed a more calculating disposition than one might have guessed when seeing her in full war-paint.

  All this Mr. Winkley noted as he stood facing her, legs stretched apart, in front of the fire.

  Pussy smiled wanly.

  “You remind me of the poem that Stanley Holloway recites, about why dogs have cold noses and men have cold behinds and women have cold elbows. Not that women do have cold elbows these days. At least, mine are always warm enough.” She sighed and gave up this attempt to be politely conversational. “I feel lousy,” she said. “Did Piggy tell you all about it?”

  “As much as he knew,” replied Mr. Winkley. “How did you know that I’d seen him?”

  “I watched him go out, and saw him come back with you, but you’re not to tell him that. Did he tell you why he tried to strangle me?”

  Mr. Winkley smiled down at her.

  There was, he thought, something refreshing about the candour of this war-baby generation. Younger people were growing old-fashioned again, almost Victorian. That was, to his mind, a great pity.

  “Suppose you tell me all about it,” he suggested, with what Pussy afterwards called “his bedside manner”. “I know that Gunn threatened to strangle you. Just go on from there.”

  Pussy gave him a vivid description of what had happened in the moonlit room.

  “...and if it wasn’t Piggy...” she said, but Mr. Winkley interrupted her.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions before we jump to conclusions,” he remarked. “Did you look round the room before you got out of bed?”

  “No. I looked at the window, and jumped out of bed facing that way.”

  She put her hand up to her throat as if it hurt.

  “So we can take it that you were attacked from behind to prevent your turning to see who was in the room. Did you recognize the voice?”

  “N... o...” said Pussy. “It was a croaking voice, like Miss Haddox’s, or something like my own is now.”

  “And you didn’t turn round before you were attacked?”

  “Oh, but I did.” Pussy shuddered. “It was ghastly – like looking at a ghost. There wasn’t a face – just a kind of blur with great eye-sockets like a skull, only they were white.”

  “Can’t you give me a better description than that?” asked Mr. Winkley, discrediting, still in the medical manner, sixty per cent of what she said.

  “Isn’t that enough to raise the hair on your scalp?” asked Pussy. “You ought to try looking at something like that in the moonlight when you’ve only just awakened from your sleep, then perhaps you’d be more sympathetic.”

  “And you say you heard a swishing sound just before the thing tightened round your neck. It’s a good job that monkey’s disappeared, or I might think...” He broke off as if a new line of thought had suggested itself to him, then said, “Do you mind if I have a look at the mark?”

  Pussy, entirely unembarrassed, pulled down the polo collar of her jumper, and revealed a thin, purplish-red line cutting into her swollen flesh at the angle at which one prunes a rose tree. Mr. Winkley rubbed his forefinger gently along it, then moved away and wiped his finger on his handkerchief.

  “H’m,” he said. “It looks something like the cut that a fairly heavy trout-line makes when it gets wound round a fish. I suppose you didn’t have all that grease on your neck last night.”

  “Yes, I had,” replied Pussy, ignoring his description of her expensive Crème Amourette. “I always cream my neck at night. I usually wipe it off with a tissue before I get into bed, but last night I forgot.”

  “You were lucky. It made the loop slip. If it had been pulled straight round your neck, you’d have had such a sore throat that you wouldn’t have been able to speak today. As it is, you don’t sound much worse than Miss Haddox. Have you told your mother anything about last night?”

  “No,” replied Pussy. “She hasn’t seen my neck, either. I just said I had a sore throat, and she took it for granted that I’d been smoking too many cigarettes, but I said I felt rotten, so she told me to stay in my room. I told Piggy, of course, because I thought he’d done it.”

  “What makes you think it was Gunn?” asked Mr. Winkley. “I know all about what he said last night, but I’ve heard him say far worse things to you before, and you haven’t taken any notice of him. I don’t suppose he’s the only person you know who has threatened you in that way either.”

  “I know,” agreed Pussy. “Mother often says she’ll murder me if I borrow her best silk stockings, and Major Jeans said the same one day over something else. But it was Piggy’s eyes. They really did look full of murder.”

  “I think you’d better have him in here and ask him,” replied Mr. Winkley.

  He ignored the girl’s cry of protest, and opened the door. He did not even look to see whether Gunn was outside in the corridor before he called him into the room.

  Gunn sauntered in, hands thrust in the pockets of his grey flannel slacks, and shoulders hunched forward in his sports coat of smooth check tweed.

  “Come along.” Mr. Winkley’s voice sounded overcheerful in contrast with the glum silence of the two young people. “I want to hear your version of what happened last night.”

  Gunn looked appealingly at Pussy, noted her air of studied aloofness, and set his jaw in obstinate silence.

  “For heaven’s sake will you stop this nonsense!” exclaimed Mr. Winkley. “I don’t care if you never speak to each other again as long as you live, but I do care about solving this mystery. I believe that Mrs. Mumsby’s murderer was in this room last night!”

  “But –” said Gunn and Pussy together.

  Mr. Winkley clapped a hand to his forehead.

  “That’s right! Both talk at once!” he said.

  “But why does the murderer want to kill me?” asked Pussy.

  “I don’t think that he does,” replied Mr. Winkley. “I think he came in here last night because he believed you had a clue to his identity, and he wanted to remove it. By waking when you did, you startled him, and he attacked you, either to prevent your recognizing him, or else to frighten you. Or, if he really did intend to kill you, he must have been disturbed in some way.”

  “It sounds nonsense to me,” said Pussy. “I haven’t got any dues. I’ve nothing belonging to anyone in my room, and as far as I know, I’m not a kleptomaniac. Anyway, there’s nothing missing here, because I’ve looked.”

  “The salmon fly,” returned Mr. Winkley.

  “The salmon fly? The one Major Jeans gave me? But I gave that to you before you went to London.”

  “I know you did,” said Mr. Winkley, “but the murderer doesn’t know that.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” persisted Pussy.

  “It will do when we know where it fits in,” was the reply.

  “Then you do think it was Major Jeans,” said Gunn, but Mr. Winkley only smiled.

  “Suppose you tell us where you fit into all this,” he said.

  Gunn began by looking daggers at Pussy.

  “You ought to know that I wouldn’t creep into your room to murder you,” he said. “You drive me mad sometimes, God knows, but even if I got to the point of throwing you into the lake, I should have to dive in and drag you out again.”

  “Well, didn’t you do something like that last night!” retorted Pussy.

  Gunn would have turned and stamped out of the room at that, if Mr. Winkley had not said, “Go on,” in tones which were anything but mild.

  “I said I’d strangle her if she played fast and loose with me again,” Gunn went on, “and my fingers were itching to do it last night, I can tell you. But I didn’t touch her. I had a few whiskies, and then went
up to my room. I didn’t undress, but walked about the room for ages. Then I drew back the curtains, and saw that it was moonlight, so I went for a walk.”

  “Leaving the hotel open?”

  “I suppose so. Everyone seemed to be in bed, including the Evanses. I unlocked the side door, and locked it again after I came back.”

  “That was probably when Miss Partridge woke up,” remarked Mr. Winkley, and in answer to their surprised looks, he went on: “It’s not unusual for telepathic messages to pass between two people who are thinking of each other. You were worrying about her all night, and she had gone to sleep weeping for you.”

  Pussy stirred uneasily in her chair, and Gunn, seeing her uneasiness, suddenly laughed.

  “Well,” he continued in lighter tones, “I’d begun to kick myself by that time for behaving like a lout, and knew I’d never sleep till I’d asked Pussy to forgive me, so I went along to her room, and tried the door. It wasn’t locked, so –”

  Mr. Winkley looked at the girl.

  “Did you lock it?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied. “I left it open in case Piggy wanted to apologize.”

  “I like that!” exclaimed Gunn. “Why should you always expect me to –”

  “Go on,” urged Mr. Winkley.

  Gunn shrugged his shoulders.

  “I slipped into the room and closed the door behind me.”

  “He’s always discreet,” remarked Pussy.

  “Then I called her very softly and said, ‘Please forgive me, I’m awfully sorry’, or words to that effect, but she didn’t reply, so I thought she must be asleep. I didn’t see any sense in waking her, so I just got out gently, and went to bed.”

  “But, if she heard what you said, as she says she did, she must have been lying on the floor near the window,” said Mr. Winkley. “How was it that you didn’t see her in the moon-light?”

  “The curtains were drawn across the window,” replied Gunn. “I couldn’t see a thing.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Winkley, as if he didn’t see at all.

  “By the way,” remarked Gunn, “I take it that some lasso technique was in use last night. Where’s the instrument of torture?”