Case Is Closed by Patricia Wentworth

Author:Patricia Wentworth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781453223635
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-10-08T10:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

MARION GREY WENT back to work after five days of Hilary’s nursing. It was about this time that Jacques Dupre wrote to his sister in Provence:

I saw Marion in the street today. It breaks one’s heart—she looks like a shadow carved in stone...

But then Jacques was a poet, and he had loved her vainly for years—one of those endless, hopeless loves.

Hilary urged a longer rest, but was silent when Marion said, ‘Don’t stop me, Hilary. If I stop I shall die. And if I die, Geoff won’t have anyone.’

It was this speech more than anything else which took Hilary down to Ledlington again just a week after her last fruitless visit. She wasn’t going to be caught in the dark this time, so she took the 9.30 train and found her way out of the station yard and into Market Street with a good fat slice of the morning still before her, to say nothing of the afternoon—only she hoped she would have found Mrs Mercer long before it came to that. She had duly pawned Aunt Arabella’s ring, and was comfortably conscious of being a capitalist with four pounds ten and sixpence in her purse. She brought it all with her, because you never know, and bicycle shops have a way of asking for a deposit before they will hire a machine to a stranger. Even a deposit does not always incline them to what they regard as a chancy transaction.

Hilary tried three bicycle shops before she encountered a very pleasant and impressionable young man who not only produced a bicycle but gave her floods of information about all the cottages between Ledlington and Ledstow. He had a most surprising crop of fair hair which stood up a sheer four inches from his freckled forehead, and he was one of the most friendly creatures Hilary had ever met. He hadn’t heard of any stranger taking any cottages—‘But then you never know, miss—I’ll just pump that back tyre up a bit. It might be Mr Greenhow’s cottage, best part of a mile and a half along the Ledstow road and turn to the left down the lane—there isn’t more than one thereabouts. I did hear he’d gone to stay with his married daughter in London, but Fred Barker told me he’d come back again. Or it might be the new house Mr Carter was building for his daughter, only she never got married at all and it was up to be let. I don’t know that you’d hardly call it a cottage, but you might try there. And there’s the Miss Soameses. They always let in the summer, but you wouldn’t hardly call it summer now, and they’re a good half-mile off the main road.’

‘I shouldn’t think that would be it.’

The young man stopped pumping and stood up.

‘There’s Humpy Dick’s place,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Nasty old tumble-down shack though. I shouldn’t think anyone ’ud take it, though you never can tell—can you?’

It didn’t sound attractive, but Hilary wasn’t looking for attractions.

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