Ordeal by Innocence Read Online Free PDF

around, get magnified.”
    “Yes, I know.” She spoke again into the receiver. “In a way I suppose it's what you'd call good news, Donald, but - it's rather upsetting. I'd rather not talk about it over the telephone... No, no, don't come here... Please - not. Not this evening. Tomorrow some time. It's about - Jacko. Yes - yes - my brother - it's just that we've found out that he didn't kill my mother after all... But please don't say anything, Donald, or talk to anyone. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow... No, Donald, no... I just can't see anyone this evening - not even you. Please. And don't say anything.” She put down the receiver, and motioned to Gwenda to take over.
    Gwenda asked for a Drymouth number. Leo said gently: “Why don't you go to the lecture with Donald, Hester? It will take your mind off things.”
    “I don't want to, Father. I couldn't.”
    Leo said: “You spoke - you gave him the impression that it wasn't good news. But you know, Hester, that's not so. We were startled. But we're all very happy about very glad... What else could we be?”
    “That's what we're going to say, is it?” said Hester. Leo said warningly: “My dear child -”
    “But it's not true, is it?” said Hester. “It's not good news. It's just terribly upsetting.”
    Gwenda said: “Micky's on the line.”
    Again Leo came and took the receiver from her. He spoke to his son very much as he had spoken to his daughter. But his news was received rather differently from the way it had been received by Mary Durrant.
    Here there was no protest, surprise or disbelief. Instead there was quick acceptance.
    “What the hell!” said Micky's voice. “After all this time? The missing witness! Well, well, Jacko's luck was out that night.”
    Leo spoke again. Micky listened.
    “Yes,” he said, “I agree with you. We'd better get together as quickly as possible, and get Marshall to advise us, too.”
    He gave a sudden quick laugh, the laugh that Leo remembered so well from the small boy who had played in the garden outside the window.
    “What's the betting?” he said. “Which of us did it?”
    Leo dropped the receiver down and left the telephone abruptly.
    “What did he say?” Gwenda asked.
    Leo told her.
    “It seems to me a silly sort of joke to make,” said Gwenda.
    Leo shot a quick glance at her. “Perhaps,” he said gently, “it wasn't altogether a joke.”

Ordeal by Innocence
    II
    Mary Durrant crossed the room and picked up some fallen petals from a vase of chrysanthemums. She put them carefully into the waste-paper basket. She was a tall, serene-looking young woman of twenty-seven who, although her face was unlined, yet looked older than her years, probably from a sedate maturity that seemed part of her make-up. She had good looks, without a trace of glamour. Regular features, a good skin, eyes of a vivid blue, and fair hair combed off her face and arranged in a large bun at the back of her neck; a style which at the moment happened to be fashionable although that was not her reason for wearing it so. She was a woman who always kept to her own style. Her appearance was like her house; neat, well kept. Any kind of dust or disorder worried her.
    The man in the invalid chair watching her as she put the fallen petals carefully away, smiled a slightly twisted smile.
    “Same tidy creature,” he said. “A place for everything and everything in its place.” He laughed, with a faint malicious note in the laugh. But Mary Durrant was quite undisturbed.
    “I do like things to be tidy,” she agreed. “You know, Phil, you wouldn't like it yourself if the house was like a shambles.”
    Her husband said with a faint trace of bitterness: “Well, at any rate I haven't got the chance of making it into one.”
    Soon after their marriage, Philip Durrant had fallen a victim to polio of the paralytic type. To Mary, who adored him, he had become her child as well as her husband.
    He himself felt at times slightly embarrassed by her