The Fallen Curtain Read Online Free PDF Page A

upset her so much, she snapped at me that she didn’t want to discuss him. She became even more snappy and nervous and depressed too. Whenever the phone rang she jumped. Once or twice I came home to find no wife,no dinner prepared; then she’d come in, looking haggard, to say she’d been out for a walk. I got her to see our doctor and he put her on tranquillisers, which just made her more depressed.
    I hadn’t seen Reeve for ages. Then, out of the blue, he phoned me at work to say he was off to the South of France for three weeks.
    “In your state of financial health?” I said. I’d had a struggle getting him to pay the January instalment of his twice-yearly income tax, and I knew he was practically broke till he got the advance on his new book in May. “The South of France is a bit pricey, isn’t it?”
    “I’ll manage,” he said. “My bank manager’s one of my fans and he’s let me have an overdraft.”
    Gwendolen didn’t seem very surprised to hear about Reeve’s holiday. He’d told me he was going on his own—the “marvellous chick” had long disappeared—and she said she thought he needed the rest, especially as there wouldn’t be any of those girls to bother him, as she put it.
      When I first met Reeve he’d been renting a flat but I persuaded him to buy one, for security and as an investment. The place was known euphemistically as a garden flat but it was in fact a basement, the lower ground floor of a big Victorian house in Bayswater. My usual route to work didn’t take me along his street, but sometimes when the traffic was heavy I’d go through the back doubles and past his house. After he’d been away for about two weeks I happened to do this one morning and, of course, I glanced at Reeve’s window. One always does glance at a friend’s house, I think, when one is passing even if one knows that friend isn’t at home. His bedroom was at the front, the top half of the window visible, the lower half concealed by the rise of lawn. I noticed that the curtains were drawn. Not particularly wise, I thought, an invitation to burglars, and then I forgot about it. But two mornings later I passed that way again, passed very slowly this time as there was a traffic hold-up, and again I glanced at Reeve’s window.The curtains were no longer quite drawn. There was a gap about six inches wide between them. Now, whatever a burglar may do, it’s very unlikely he’ll pull back drawn curtains. I didn’t consider burglars this time. I thought Reeve must have come back early.
    Telling myself I should be late for work anyway if I struggled along in this traffic jam, I parked the car as soon as I could at a meter. I’ll knock on old Reeve’s door, I thought, and get him to make me a cup of coffee. There was no answer. But as I looked once more at that window I was almost certain those curtains had been moved again, and in the past ten minutes. I rang the doorbell of the woman in the flat upstairs. She came down in her dressing gown.
    “Sorry to disturb you,” I said. “But do you happen to know if Mr. Baker’s come back?”
    “He’s not coming back till Saturday,” she said.
    “Sure of that?”
    “Of course I’m sure,” she said rather huffily. “I put a note through his door Monday, and if he was back he’d have come straight up for this parcel I took in for him.”
    “Did he take his car, d’you know?” I said, feeling like a detective in one of my favourite crime novels.
    “Of course he did. What is this? What’s he done?”
    I said he’d done nothing, as far as I knew, and she banged the door in my face. So I went down the road to the row of lock-up garages. I couldn’t see much through the little panes of frosted glass in the door of Reeve’s garage, just enough to be certain the interior wasn’t empty but that that greenish blur was the body of Reeve’s Fiat. And then I knew for sure. He hadn’t gone away at all. I chuckled to myself as I imagined him lying low for these