Eight Murders In the Suburbs Read Online Free PDF Page B

out of London. The house was vibrant with memories of a benevolently autocratic father, whose lightest wish became his wife’s instant duty—whose opinions on everything she accepted as inspired wisdom. In April 1931 Arthur Penfold married and eagerly set about modelling his life on that of his father.
    Of his bride we need note only that she had been an efficient business girl, a rung or two up the ladder, that she was physically attractive and well mannered—the sort of girl his friends expected him to choose. They had been married six months to a day when he found that note in the hall—six months, he would have told you, of unalloyed happiness. A wife who— ex officio , as it were—liked all the things that he liked, lived for the great moment of the day when he returned home, to regale her with small talk of his achievements in business. There was not, he would have asserted, a single cloud in his matrimonial sky.
    â€˜Arthur dear. I am terribly sorry and utterly ashamed of myself, but I can’t stick it any longer. It’s not your fault—I have no complaint and no excuse. I shall stay with Mother while I’m looking for a job. I don’t want any money, please, and I’ll agree to anything as long as you don’t ask me to come back—Julie.
    P.S.—There isn’t another man and I don’t suppose there ever will be.’
    Julie remained unattached for three years. Then she wrote Penfold begging for divorce, as she wished to remarry. Penfold chivalrously insisted that he should be the one to give cause, so that she could start again untainted with scandal. He did not hate Julie, but he did hate himself and to a somewhat dangerous degree.
    He was the fourth generation of his family to live in that house. The Penfolds were of the local aristocracy and ‘knew everybody,’ meaning fifty or so of the more prosperous families in a largish suburb. Arthur Penfold—though no one claimed him as an intimate friend—was popular, in the sense that no one disliked him nor ever suggested excluding him. He was of medium height, with thin, sandy hair, a little ponderous in manner, self-centred but not boastful. When he was deserted, for no apparent reason, ‘everybody’ agreed that he had been abominably treated and was entitled to sympathy.
    While Julie was with him, his own happiness had been obvious to everybody. He had taken for granted that Julie was happy too. How could you have a happy husband and an unhappy wife? But, somehow, you had!
    Why had she left him? Too late, he tried to imagine her point of view. It was uphill work, because he knew nothing of her intimate personal history, her tastes, her hopes, her fears. In the sense in which married lovers explore each other’s personality and impulse, he knew nothing at all about her—had desired no such knowledge. It escaped him that this might be the reason why Julie had thrown in her hand.
    In the sympathy of the neighbours he saw only pity for a man who had some taint or defect, unknown to himself, which made his society intolerable to a normal woman. How could he doubt that behind a mask of friendliness, the neighbours were laughing at him!
    There was a certain tragic grandeur in the idea of a man with a taint that baffled definition. In a short time, he began to believe in it.
    The desertion was followed by three years of bitter self-contempt, during which every friendly greeting was held to mask a sneer. Irrelevantly, he felt a little better when the divorce was completed. In the summer he accepted an invitation to stay with a cousin who was the vicar of Helmstane. Here he met Margaret Darrington, who became his second wife.
    Margaret was twenty-four and a beauty, though she seemed not to know it. Her clothes, expensive but ill-chosen, verged on dowdiness. She lacked the assurance of a girl specially gifted by nature. Her intelligence was adult, but her temperament was that of a prim