Death and the Pleasant Voices by Mary Fitt

Author:Mary Fitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Golden Age mysteries british;1940s murder mysteries;bibliomysteries;murder mystery series;vintage murder mystery
Publisher: Moonstone Press
Published: 2022-08-31T12:15:25+00:00

9

Standing on the steps of the porch, I looked out over the lawns and the flower-beds, wondering what I should do now with my day.

It was a delightful morning, warm and sunny; but a great load of depression sat heavily on me. It was not, to be frank, because of poor Hugo that I had this sudden sense of emptiness, of loneliness and futility. After all, I had never known him, and I could feel only a passing regret at his pitiful end. It was, I realized, because this brutal happening had dispelled the romantic atmosphere in which I had been living for the past three days – was it really only so long? – into which I had plunged through the thunderstorm and the blinding rain to the House of the Monkeys. Tomorrow or the next day it would end, this curious adventure, in the dusty, matter-of-fact setting of a country law-court. I did not want it to end – not yet, anyway. I wanted to go on, to find out something: no, not, I’m afraid, who it was that had shot Hugo, but some larger question that included the less: what was the mainspring of these people’s lives? Who was there among us whose life was lived on such a different plane from mine that to achieve his end he could deliberately take a gun and shoot a fellow-creature in the back? Again and again there came into my mind the scene of my first entry into the drawing-room, into that circle of hostile eyes. The answer lay there, if only one had the wit to discern it. I had been the first, the accidental target of that murderous hatred, then Marcel; and then at last, and correctly, Hugo. Yes, that was the experience I had so strangely undergone, of coming within the sights, as it were, of somebody’s will to destroy. But try as I would, I could not tell whence that will to destroy proceeded.

I paced slowly out along the gravel walk, and down to the lily-pond, half-hoping to find Evelyn still there, for I had not been gone more than twenty minutes or so; but neither she nor Parmoor was to be seen. I sat there for a while, watching the goldfish coming to the surface, then diving and shooting with a whisk of their fins and tails beneath the great dark leaves; I sat smoking and thinking and wondering what was happening at the house up there.

I had just ground out my third cigarette-end on the flagged pathway, and was preparing to leave, when I heard a low whistle above me, and I turned to see Marcel looking down at me over the wall and smiling. In a moment he had run down the steps and joined me.

‘That’s a wonderful place for eavesdropping,’ he said, sitting down beside me. He had recovered all his aplomb: there was no trace of his previous agitation as he took out his cigarette-case and passed it to me. I noticed, however, that it was not the gold case with the initials H.

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