The Bells at Old Bailey by Dorothy Bowers

Author:Dorothy Bowers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: golden age crime novels;detective fiction;1940s crime fiction;murder;poison;The Detection Club;British;fair play mystery;clues
Publisher: Moonstone Press
Published: 2019-09-20T11:59:32+00:00

4

In Samela’s flat Raikes faced an indignant trio. George Wild, it was true, slung along the arm of his wife’s chair, was keeping his indignation well leashed, but the ladies had given a fine display. Anger, moreover, was doing them good; temporarily, at least, it burned up grief. It was later that all thoughts would end in the one thought, that Jane was dead.

Wrath was not to be wondered at, perhaps. There had been little that was veiled about the inspector’s suggestion regarding the postcard found underneath Jane’s body.

“But you must be crazy!” Samela cried again, with reckless deliberation, in spite of the hot incredulity that choked her. “I kill Jane! And if I could, if I did, how would she have the chance to put my name and address so neatly on a postcard so as to let you know? I’ve heard some fantastic theories aired in the last few days, but this beats them all!”

Raikes gave her a bitter little smile, edged with triumph. “You’ve heard nothing aired suggesting you killed Miss Kingsley, Mrs. Wild. The remarks are your own.”

Samela, who could have sworn they were the inspector’s, subsided momentarily like a landed fish. George took time by the forelock.

“Don’t be a fool, Sam,” he said in a voice of quiet authority, and to Raikes, “It’s like this, Inspector. My wife’s giving tactless expression to what we’re all, perhaps, more or less feeling, namely, that by imputation, at least, you do regard her as an object of suspicion because her name appears on the card you found—”

“Oh, not only because of that!” Sammy, irrepressible, interrupted, fanning her own flames and near to tears, “I was suspected straight off when Miss Tidy was killed, because I didn’t ring up the Keepsake, and because I was the first to see the lights burning though the sun was shining, and because I wanted the window broken, and—because—because of hundreds of other sins of commission and omission!”

“Will you shut up?” her husband growled with good-natured ferocity. He shot a wary look at Raikes. “Don’t want to sound brutal or—or indifferent, you know, but this business of young Jane has hit us all harder than the old girl’s affair, ghastly as it was. That’s why Samela is giving us the works.”

“Giving me, you mean,” the inspector said smoothly. “Mrs. Wild is inclined—if I may say so without calling down more brimstone—to a hypersensitivity which, in fairness you should admit, is in itself suspicious. She will anticipate, forestall, make cutting little remarks that at least sound self-condemnatory, and from the beginning of this enquiry continually takes the words out of my mouth—”

“Then they are there to take,” Sammy muttered, quelled but unquenched.

“Hush,” Crystal said loudly. She was unashamedly frightened and took no pains to conceal the fact that she had been crying her eyes out. “All this—this quarrelling isn’t decent, truly it isn’t, with Jane gone.”

“Agreed,” Raikes said heartily. “As friends of Jane Kingsley you can’t want to place yourselves in an opposite camp to me.

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