THE CHINA MAIL FRIDAY SUPPLEMENT, JUNE 25, 1987
MURDER IN A COTTAGE
was shot. It is absurd, of course, but sooner or later I have got to ask you what you were doing.
there."
"Minding my own business," Eliot said quickly.
"That's no good," Orme said. Eliot smiled charmingly. "Of course it isn't. Do forgive me, I ought to know better. But I'm so new to crime-serious crime- and you're rather flustering me." He did not look in the least flus- tered. "I dare say these charm- ing people, who know everything, have told you that I come down here to see Miss Severn. It's true. We'd like to get married, but Sir Thomas-who could do everything for us-won't do... a damned thing. see me."
"Why not?”
He won't even
"Like so many of these well- to-do Puritans, my dear Orme, he seems to regard the act of having no money as a kind.
of. moral defect a punishment for sin, I suppose. I have no money. Therefore I am immoral. Miss Severnfortunately, is not to the same degree—a Puritan. On the morning when the pig-dealer did and I assure you that if you had seen him alive you would not be taking all this trouble about his fortunate decease...”
"I've seen him dead," Orme said grimly.
Eliot shuddered. "Forgive me. for recalling him to you. As I was saying that_morning___I did what I've done every morn- ing since I've been here. I walk- ed past Blaber's cottage, through `the plantation at the back, and along under the wall of Sir Thom- as's park to a door that opens out from one of his orchards. There I waited for Miss Severn to come if she could. That morning she did come. We were together for some time, her uncle being luckily shut up in his room, she told me, with an attack of gout. The only thing, my dear Orme, that re- conciles me to the thought of Severn's being 80 revoltingly well-off is that it has given him severe gout. Miss Severn and I spent the morning and part of the afternoon together. I went back to the inn for tea.”
"I see," Orme said.
**
"Forgive me,' Eliot corrected him gently, "but I don't think that you do quite." "I don't mind telling you all this. But it would be very embarrassing—not to me but to Miss Severn-if I had to explain it in public."
"Oh, quite," Orme said hastily. He resented the way in which Eliot always contrived to make him appear an obtuse, blundering creature. "I don't think will be necessary. **
that
"Let's hope not,” Eliot murmur- ed. He stood up, with his en- gaging smile. "May I go now? Or r is the third degree still
to
"Don't be an ass,”
"Orme said. He felt sure that Eliot was telling the truth. At the same time. that curious nagging intuition he had, which sometimes allowed him to feel farther into another
towards the plantation says you were sobbing. Another says you, seemed annoyed."
"I was annoyed. I had hic- coughs," Eliot said simply. "I always get them when I'm excit- ed. It's the great tragedy of my life. I got them the first time I
saw Catherine-Miss Severn alone. And again when I went with her to see her uncle for the. first and only time.
I`dare: say that's really why he mistrusts me. You can't blame him too much, can you? You-being a man of the world; my dear
Orme-will
realise what it means to me to have this ghastly infliction. It has made me what I am, a haunt- ed man.".
Orme looked at him as he stood there, exquisitely although sim- ply dressed, one white hand smoothing his dark, sleek hair, and felt that the epithet was pure- ly conventional.
The next day was a perfect July day. He walked past Blaber's cottage, into the plantation, and followed the path under the wall until he came to the door. He was looking at it when two persons approached it from the other dir- ection. Michael Eliot and a young woman. Miss Severn, of course.
Orme looked at her curiously. She was not beautiful, but she was charming, and she had a beauti- ful voice. He thought she was too good for Eliot..
Eliot introduced him to her with a sardonic, but not un- friendly air. This is Orme. You must be careful what you say because he's looking for evidence against me.”
*Don't be absurd. Isn't he absurd, Mr. Orme?”
"Very," Orme said.
"Last night," Eliot said dream- ily, "I told him the darkest secret of my life and he never so much as blinked. So don't think because he looks as he does that he's not thinking. He's weigh- ing every word you say and find- ing it wanting.”
Orme was annoyed by this. He did not want to appear before Miss Severn in the role of obtuse, unintelligent detective. He said something rather incisive. Miss Severn seemed to know that he was hurt. She turned to her lover with a sweet and reproach- ful smile.
"Do you think we might ask Mr. Orme to lunch?”!
"Why not? Even sleuths some- times eat and sleep.".
I wish you wouldn't keep harping on my profession,” Orme said, testily. “It's a far more respectable profession than yours. I never landed the country in a European war, and I don't go about thinking myself a superior being on the strength of having to attend vulgarly expensive din ners for what I believe you call potentates."
last link w
will have snapped be- tween the dreadful crushing vul- garity of the modern world and the leisurely, elegant, lovely past. In those days I shall have re- signed and be dragging out a ∙squalid middle-age in Tunbridge
Wella."
"Darling," Catherine Severn ́said, “light the spirit lamp.” She had produced a picnic basket and a primus from just inside the door in the wall, and was spread- ing the things on the grass. "There's quite enough for you," she said prettily to Orme. "We always have lunch like this if
my uncle is ill. Cook gives it to me."
"Is this what you were doing the day Blaber was shot?" Orme asked thoughtlessly.
Eliot pointed a long finger at him. "What did I tell you? You must be careful, Cat. An unguard- ed word and I shall be on my way to Dorchester gaol."
Catherine laughed. And again, in her laugh and her glance at Eliot, Orme caught that quiver of excitement or apprehension. She turned to Orme. "This lunch is by way of consolation," she said. "We'd hoped to be able to speak to my uncle again to-day. He was quite cheerful when he thought he'd soon get rid of poor Blaber's cottage but the police haven't traced his relatives yet, and it looks as though everything might drag on indefinitely. He's very irritablé again to-day.”
"I'll let you know the moment we discover anyone," Orme of- fered.
He liked her very much. After- wards, as he was walking back to the inn, he wondered what on earth she saw in Eliot with his
“No,” Eliot protested languidly. “Not in my department. We call everyone below the rank of em- peror by his nickname. But that I b doesn't make us superior What gives us this air of conscious merit-pathetic if you like- that we are the last bulwark person's mind than he could see, as against the roaring sea de warned him that Ellot was keep macracy. We may be trivial, pur ing a great deal back. There was
an odd vibration in his voice Occupations may be absurd, re-
wholly unconscious the reflection of something in his mind, some- thing exciting which he had not allowed to appear on the surface. "One woman who saw you, gó
(Continued from Page 1)
tart mind and drawling, provoca- tive voice. He found a message waiting for him to say that a man answering to the description he had circulated of Eliot had taken the noon train at the junction on the morning of Blaber's death. He hired the car belonging to the butcher and drove into the junc tion. Careful questioning of the porter who had seen the man left no doubt in his mind that it was Eliot. So there had been no picnic under the wall of the park that day.
"Was he alone?” he asked sud- denly.
"Yes."
"Where did he go?"
"Oi dunno where he went tu, the porter said craftily. "His ticket might have took 'ee to Dor- chester if so be he went there.”
On the way to Dorchester Orme tried to keep his mind to the im- possibility of Eliot's having com- mitted so sordid and apparently meaningless a murder. Yet was it so meaningless? Eliot needed. money. Everyone knew that Blaber⠀⠀ kept large sums of money in his cottage. Eliot would have been told about the income-tax man- it was a village joke. He might have gone into the cottage on an impulse to steal, been surprised by Blaber,
shot him to stifle the scandal. Fan- tastic! And yet Orme was coming to believe t
that the more fantastic a story seemed the. more likely it was to be strictly true. Murder itself, done by a civilised man, was fantastic- like meeting a naked savage. in Bond-street. He remembered suddenly that on that evening at Oxford, when Eliot had behaved (Continued on Page 8)
and
"Equal to a
fine liqueur
"I can tell
White Horse
blindfold! And to think that at on
petitive, and mysterious but we time I used simply to ask for whisky-and-soda!
are not vulgar. Using the word in its proper sense, as meaning
· of or pertaining to the people. We do not pertain to the people. When that is no longer true the
White Horse is just like a fine liqueur!
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