What Dread Hand? Read Online Free PDF Page A

it long ago: from the very beginning. ‘A very deep-laid, elaborate, absolutely sure-fire plan.’
    ‘Between the doctor and Theo then, if you must. But Bill—why drag Bill into it?’
    ‘Ah, Bill,’ he said. ‘But without Bill…? You have been very loyal; but I think we must now come into the open about Bill?’
    And he was back with her, so many weeks ago now, when Cyrus Caxton’s proposed new marriage had first become an open secret. ‘With your job, Elizabeth, you could travel, you could see the world.’ ‘I have seen the world,’ she had answered. ‘All right,’ she admitted now, in a small voice. ‘Yes. I did go to America, with a private patient. I did get married there. Cyrus knew that I’d been married and divorced. I didn’t tell other people because he didn’t like anyone knowing that I was—well, he called it second-hand.’
    Married; and divorced. Married to one who ‘bumming around’ had heard through the devoted family servants that his mother’s illness would be her last. ‘Inspector, we were desperate. He wouldn’t work, he gambled like a maniac, my nursing wouldn’t keep the two of us. And yet I couldn’t leave him. I told you that I had had a lost love; well, that was true in its own way. My love he was—and yet not lost really after all: my love he is still and to my ruin ever shall be. I suppose some women are like that.’
    ‘And some men,’ said Cockie; thinking of that suddenly desolate look with which he had said, ‘I think now that I made some pretty big mistakes.’
    ‘I’ve been so ashamed, Inspector,’ she said, weeping again. ‘Not only of what we were doing; but of all the lies, all the acting.’
    ‘Yet you went through with it.’
    ‘You don’t know Bill,’ she said. ‘But yes—it’s true. He wrote to his mother secretly, through the servants. He said a girl would get in touch with her, a wonderful nurse, who would soon be coming over to England. He told her to say nothing to the old man but to try to get this girl engaged to look after her; of course the girl was me, Inspector. The idea at first was simply to look after his interests, to try to get his mother’s money ensured to him, before she died. But then he got this other idea. The old man would soon be a widower; and he thought of him as a very old man, old and, he knew, in bad health. He hadn’t seen his step-father for years; to an adolescent, all adults seem far more aged than they are. He imagined an old crock far more in need of a nurse than of a wife. So—the first thing was a divorce. He beat up a man whom he accused of having an affair with me; he over-did that a bit and landed himself in prison; but even that he didn’t mind, it helped in speeding up the divorce because of the reason for the assault.’
    ‘Without a divorce, you couldn’t have inherited, of course. The marriage with the old man had to be water-tight.’
    ‘Inspector,’ she said, in anguish, ‘don’t believe for one moment that this began as a murder plot. It started from small beginnings, as I’ve said; and then in that gambler’s mind of his, it just grew and grew. Here was this golden chance. He knew that I had this—this power over men; something that I just have, I can’t help it, you’ve seen for yourself how, without any effort on my part, it works. With such an asset—how could he bear not to exploit it? A sick old man, recently widowed, a pretty little nurse already installed: how could it fail?’
    ‘And he was prepared to wait?’
    ‘He saw the thing in terms of a year or two, no longer. Meanwhile he would remain in England, we could see one another—after all, he was a member of the family. And I would provide him with money, I suppose; and he would gamble.’
    ‘But before this happy condition of things, you must nurse the dying mother; and then get to work succeeding in her place with the widower.’
    She turned away her head. ‘I know you think it sounds terrible; put that way, it seems