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“I’ll just drain the chips … Wait, I’ll get another paper. Better keep this one. ’T wouldn’t be likely to be police—not after all this time. Maybe it’s lawyers—and money in it. It doesn’t say something to your advantage … but it might be all the same … Wish I knew who I could ask about it. It says write to some address in London—but I’m not sure I’d like to do a thing like that … not to a lot of people in London … What do you say, Jim?”
“Ar,” said Mr. Kimble, hungrily eyeing the fish and chips.
The discussion was postponed.
Thirteen
WALTER FANE
I
Gwenda looked across the broad mahogany desk at Mr. Walter Fane.
She saw a rather tired-looking man of about fifty, with a gentle, nondescript face. The sort of man, Gwenda thought, that you would find it a little difficult to recollect if you had just met him casually … A man who, in modern phrase, lacked personality. His voice, when he spoke, was slow and careful and pleasant. Probably, Gwenda decided, a very sound lawyer.
She stole a glance round the office—the office of the senior partner of the firm. It suited Walter Fane, she decided. It was definitely old-fashioned, the furniture was shabby, but was made of good solid Victorian material. There were deed boxes piled up against the walls—boxes with respectable County names on them. Sir John Vavasour-Trench. Lady Jessup. Arthur ffoulkes, Esq. Deceased.
The big sash windows, the panes of which were rather dirty, looked into a square backyard flanked by the solid walls of a seventeenth-century adjoining house. There was nothing smart or up to date anywhere, but there was nothing sordid either. It was superficially an untidy office with its piled-up boxes, and its littered desk, and its row of law books leaning crookedly on a shelf—but it was actually the office of someone who knew exactly where to lay his hand upon anything he wanted.
The scratching of Walter Fane’s pen ceased. He smiled his slow, pleasant smile.
“I think that’s all quite clear, Mrs. Reed,” he said. “A very simple will. When would you like to come in and sign it?”
Gwenda said whenever he liked. There was no particular hurry.
“We’ve got a house down here, you know,” she said. “Hillside.”
Walter Fane said, glancing down at his notes, “Yes, you gave me the address….”
There was no change in the even tenor of his voice.
“It’s a very nice house,” said Gwenda. “We love it.”
“Indeed?” Walter Fane smiled. “Is it on the sea?”
“No,” said Gwenda. “I believe the name has been changed. It used to be St. Catherine’s.”
Mr. Fane took off his pince-nez. He polished them with a silk handkerchief, looking down at the desk.
“Oh yes,” he said. “On the Leahampton road?”
He looked up and Gwenda thought how different people who habitually wear glasses look without them. His eyes, a very pale grey, seemed strangely weak and unfocussed.
It makes his whole face look, thought Gwenda, as though he isn’t really there.
Walter Fane put on the pince-nez again. He said in his precise lawyer’s voice, “I think you said you did make a will on the occasion of your marriage?”
“Yes. But I’d left things in it to various relatives in New Zealand who have died since, so I thought it would be simpler really to make a new one altogether—especially as we mean to live permanently in this country.”
Walter Fane nodded.
“Yes, quite a sound view to take. Well, I think this is all quite clear, Mrs. Reed. Perhaps if you come in the day after tomorrow? Will eleven o’clock suit you?”
“Yes, that will be quite all right.”
Gwenda rose to her feet and Walter Fane rose also.
Gwenda said, with exactly the little rush she had rehearsed beforehand, “I—I asked specially for you, because I think—I mean I believe—that you once knew my—my mother.”
“Indeed?” Walter Fane put a little additional social warmth into his manner. “What was her name?”
“Halliday. Megan Halliday. I think—I’ve been told—that you were once engaged to her?”
A clock on the wall ticked. One, two, one two, one two.
Gwenda suddenly felt her heart beating a little faster. What a very quiet face Walter Fane had. You might see a house like that—a house with all the blinds pulled down. That would mean a house with a dead body in it. (What idiotic thoughts you do have, Gwenda!)
Walter Fane, his voice unchanged, unruffled, said, “No, I never knew your mother, Mrs. Reed. But I was once engaged, for a short period, to Helen Kennedy who afterwards married Major Halliday as his second wife.”
“Oh, I see. How stupid of me. I’ve got it all wrong. It was Helen—my stepmother. Of course it’s all long before I remember. I was only a child when my father’s second marriage broke up. But I heard someone say that you’d once been engaged to Mrs. Halliday in India—and I thought of course it was my own mother—because of India, I mean … My father met her in India.”
“Helen Kennedy came out to India to marry me,” said Walter Fane. “Then she changed her mind. On the boat going home she met your father.”
It was a plain unemotional statement of fact. Gwenda still had the impression of a house with the blinds down.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Have I put my foot in it?”
Walter Fane smiled—his slow, pleasant smile. The blinds were up.
“It’s nineteen or twenty years ago, Mrs. Reed,” he said. “One’s youthful troubles and follies don’t mean much after that space of time. So you are Halliday’s baby daughter. You know, don’t you, that your father and Helen actually lived here in Dillmouth for a while?”
“Oh yes,” said Gwenda, “that’s really why we came here. I didn’t remember it properly, of course, but when we had to decide where we’d live in England, I came to Dillmouth first of all, to see what it was really like, and I thought it was such an attractive place that I decided that we’d park ourselves right here and nowhere else. And wasn’t it luck? We’ve actually got the same house that my people lived in long ago.”
“I remember the house,” said Walter Fane. Again he gave that slow, pleasant smile. “You may not remember me, Mrs. Reed, but I rather imagine I used to give you piggybacks once.”
Gwenda laughed.
“Did you really? Then you’re quite an old friend, aren’t you? I can’t pretend I remember you—but then I was only about two and a half or three, I suppose … Were you back on leave from India or something like that?”
“No, I’d chucked India for good. I went out to try tea-planting—but the life didn’t suit me. I was cut out to follow in my father’s footsteps and be a prosy unadventurous country solicitor. I’d passed all my law exams earlier, so I simply came back and went straight into the firm.” He paused and said, “I’ve been here ever since.”
Again there was a pause and he repeat
ed in a lower voice, “Yes—ever since….”
But eighteen years, thought Gwenda, isn’t really such a long time as all that….
Then, with a change of manner, he shook hands with her and said, “Since we seem to be old friends, you really must bring your husband to tea with my mother one day. I’ll get her to write to you. In the meanwhile, eleven o’clock on Thursday?”
Gwenda went out of the office and down the stairs. There was a cobweb in the angle of the stairway. In the middle of the web was a pale, rather nondescript spider. It didn’t look, Gwenda thought, like a real spider. Not the fat juicy kind of spider who caught flies and ate them. It was more like a ghost of a spider. Rather like Walter Fane, in fact.
II
Giles met his wife on the seafront.
“Well?” he asked.
“He was here in Dillmouth at the time,” said Gwenda. “Back from India, I mean. Because he gave me piggybacks. But he couldn’t have murdered anyone—not possibly. He’s much too quiet and gentle. Very nice, really, but the kind of person you never really notice. You know, they come to parties, but you never notice when they leave. I should think he was frightfully upright and all that, and devoted to his mother, and with a lot of virtues. But from a woman’s point of view, terribly dull. I can see why he didn’t cut any ice with Helen. You know, a nice safe person to marry—but you don’t really want to.”
“Poor devil,” said Giles. “And I suppose he was just crazy about her.”
“Oh, I don’t know … I shouldn’t think so, really. Anyway, I’m sure he wouldn’t be our malevolent murderer. He’s not my idea of a murderer at all.”
“You don’t really know a lot about murderers, though, do you, my sweet?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well—I was thinking about quiet Lizzie Borden—only the jury said she didn’t do it. And Wallace, a quiet man whom the jury insisted did kill his wife, though the sentence was quashed on appeal. And Armstrong who everybody said for years was such a kind unassuming fellow. I don’t believe murderers are ever a special type.”
