Free Death Knocks Three Times by Anthony Gilbert Page B

incapable of managing her own life. Oh, Frances, I know you were prepared to relieve me of that burden, but it was impossible. No one but I knew how it must be carried, I and my father who left me Isabel as part of his legacy on his death-bed. As for Locket, when I heard she was back I recommended her to Lady Trevanion, who, I knew, was looking for a housekeeper. She’s not perfect, I
    told her, but which of them is? At least she’s clean and honest, and she doesn’t ask the outrageous wages of these young women with their hair flying on their shoulders and fingernails looking as though they’d been dipped blood. But would Locket go? Dear me, no. She had tasted independence. She was never going to live in again. She ‘obliges,’ I understand, a number of residents, but really I can tell you nothing definite about her. Do I understand you to suggest that she may have written these letters?”
    “It’s a possibility, Clara,” said Miss Pettigrew, in her deep voice. “She had the necessary knowledge—about Isabel’s fear of the dark, for instance. All her friends were aware of it, but would a stranger be likely to know?”
    “My point precisely,” chimed in John eagerly, feeling himself one of that blessed band of brothers of whom Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion are shining lights.
    “Locket might talk, she was a great chatterbox. And then Isabel was highly indiscreet. She had an unfortunate habit of entering into conversations with strangers in omnibuses or in shelters on the sea-front. That was one reason why I was not anxious for her to go out alone. No one knows what she may not have said.”
    “The word anniversary is spelt with a single ‘n’ which might argue an illiterate person. The printing, I dare say, is deliberately malformed. If the writer is someone known to yourself …”
    “I doubt if you can go much my the spelling,” demurred John, “Plenty of fellows with a Varsity education might spell anniversary that way.”
    “A great pity their parents wasted their money, if that’s so,” said Clara. “You, of course, would not make that mistake, John, except deliberately.”
    “As for maniacs,” continued John in dogged tones, “plenty of them take to religion, which could explain the text from the Bible.”
    “So we are now assuming that the letters are written by a religious maniac? That considerably enlarges the field.”
    “One thing that strikes me as odd,” for once John did not intend to be deflated by his alarming relative, “is that so far there’s been no talk of blackmail. What, then, is the motive behind the letters?”
    “That surely is obvious. I am being warned that I am in danger.
    The last letter, at all events, constitutes a threat against my life.”
    “And the motive?”
    Miss Pettigrew took up the tale. “It occurs to me that there may be a soupgon of truth underlying all this melodrama. For instance we are all aware of the coroner’s verdict, but did it never pass through your mind, Clara, as I must admit it did through mine, that perhaps Isabel’s death was not an accident?”
    “You mean that she deliberately threw herself off the balcony? But that is absurd. John here will tell you that only a few days before this tragedy she was in the highest of spirits.”
    “Ah, but that was a few days earlier. Supposing something had happened?”
    “What should happen?”
    “You were not in her confidence?”
    “She told me nothing that has any bearing on her sudden death.”
    “And you, Mr. Sherren?” Miss Pettigrew turned smartly on him.
    “As I told Aunt Clara at the time, she gave me the impression she had made some new friendship. I can think of nothing else that would have made her so happy, or caused her to speak as she did about life being worthwhile after one had given up hope. And if anything had happened to—to crash that friendship, she might have felt desperate …” He paused, letting the silence finish the sentence for him.
    “I agree with your