The Fallen Curtain Read Online Free PDF Page B

gave a little gasp and stood stock-still.
    “Get in, darling,” I said gently. “I want to talk to you.”
    She got in but she didn’t speak. I drove down to the Bayswater Road and into the Park. There, on the Ring, I parked under the plane trees, and because she still didn’t utter a word, I said, “You mustn’t think I don’t understand. We’ve been married ten years and I daresay I’m a dull sort of chap. Reeve’s exciting and different and—well, maybe it’s only natural for you to think you’ve fallen for him.”
    She stared at me stonily. “I love him and he loves me.”
    “That’s nonsense,” I said, but it wasn’t the chill of the spring evening that made me shiver. “Just because he’s used that charm of his on you…”
    She interrupted me. “I want a divorce.”
    “For heaven’s sake,” I said, “you hardly know Reeve. You’ve never been alone with him, have you?”
    “Never been alone with him?” She gave a brittle, desperate laugh. “He’s been my lover for six months. And now I’m going to him. I’m going to tell him he doesn’t have to hide from women any more because I’ll be with him all the time.”
    In the half-dark I gaped at her. “I don’t believe you,” I said, but I did. I did. “You mean you along with all the rest …? My wife?”
    “I’m going to be Reeve’s wife. I’m the only one that understands him, the only one he can talk to. He told me that just before—before he went away.”
    “Only he didn’t go away.” There was a great redness in front of my eyes like a lake of blood. “You fool,” I shouted at her. “Don’t you see it’s you he’s hiding from,
you?
He’s done this to get away from you like he’s got away from all the others. Love you? He never even gave you a present, not even a photograph. If you go there, he won’t let you in. You’re the last person he’d let in.”
    “I’m going to him,” she cried, and she began to struggle with the car door. “I’m going to him, to live with him, and I never want to see you again!”
    In the end I drove home alone. Her wish came true and she never did see me again.
      When she wasn’t back by eleven I called the police. They asked me to go down to the police station and fill out a Missing Persons form, but they didn’t take my fear very seriously. Apparently when a woman of Gwendolen’s age disappears they take it for granted she’s gone off with a man. They took it seriously all right when a park keeper found her strangled body among some bushes in the morning.
    That was on the Thursday. The police wanted to know where Gwendolen could have been going so far from her home. They wanted the names and addresses of all our friends. Was there anyone we knew in Kensington or Paddington or Bayswater, anywhere in the vicinity of the Park? I said there was no one. The next day they asked me again and I said, as if I’d just remembered, “Only Reeve Baker. The novelist, you know.” I gave them his address. “But he’s away on holiday, has been for three weeks. He’s not coming home till tomorrow.”
    What happened after that I know from the evidence given at Reeve’s trial, his trial for the murder of my wife. The police called on him on Saturday morning. I don’t think they suspected him at all at first. My reading of crime fiction has taught me they would have asked him for any information he could give about our private life.
    Unfortunately for him, they had already talked to some of his neighbours. Reeve had led all these people to think he had really gone away. The milkman and the paper boy were both certain he had been away. So when the police questioned him about that, and he knew just why they were questioning him, he got into a panic. He didn’t dare say he’d been in France. They could have shown that to be false without the least trouble. Instead, he told the truth and said he’d been lying low to escape the attentions of a woman. Which woman? He wouldn’t say, but