Free Weekend with Death by Patricia Wentworth Page B

remind her about it. All very gentle and trivial. There were no more tears. Presently she yawned once or twice, and at last sent Sarah to bed.
    â€œYou are sure you are all right now? Shall I leave the fire on or not? You won’t be too hot like that?”
    â€œNo—I am always cold. But I shall sleep now.”
    â€œI can stay a little longer if you like.”
    â€œNo, no—it won’t be necessary—I shall sleep. Good-night.”
    Sarah said, “Good-night.”
    It was cold on the landing, and black dark. She felt for the newel-post and the bottom step of the stair. Half way up she had the horrid thought of how very unpleasant it would be to bump into Morgan coming down. It was not only an unpleasant thought, it was a crazy one, because it was ten thousand a year to a halfpenny that Morgan was asleep in the back room over the study, and self-evident that he could have no possible business on the attic floor. All the same, she kept a hand well out in front of her till she came to the top of the stair and the sight of her own lighted room.
    A yard from the door she stopped. So that was why the stair had been so dark. The door was not shut. But she thought she had left it wider open than this. She tried to remember exactly how she had left it. She couldn’t be sure—Joanna was clutching her. She couldn’t remember stopping to close the door, and yet here it was with only a chink of light showing against the jamb. She opened it now, and left it wide whilst she looked inside the wardrobe and under the bed. Then she barricaded it again with the stout Victorian chair. It was as heavy as lead, with a solid curly frame and faded damask upholstery. It would at any rate give fair warning if anyone tried the door. But she didn’t think anyone would—not now— not again . She was as sure as she could be sure of anything that someone had been, and gone.
    She was laughing a little as she opened her middle drawer. And then she stopped laughing. Her hand went down into the drawer and came back again. Sarah stared at it in amazement. Because she had expected her hand to come back empty, and it wasn’t empty—it was holding the oiled-silk packet.
    She went on staring at it for quite a long time. And then all at once a bright colour came into her cheeks and her eyes began to sparkle. She held the packet close under the light and examined it. Not her thread—and not her stitches. Pretty good, but not good enough. The thread was ordinary cotton, not linen thread, and the stitches were not so neatly taken. Someone had opened the packet and sewn it up again. If they had removed what was inside it, they had put something in its place. She could feel the sharp edge of an envelope. There was nothing in the feeling to show that it was not the original envelope. That was clever. And it was very clever not to take the packet—it gave the thief quite a lot of margin. If it hadn’t been for the difference between 30 cotton and linen thread, a difference which probably didn’t exist to the male mind, Sarah would never have known that the packet had been tampered with, and by the time anyone did find out, the tampering might have taken place anywhere and been effected by anyone. By the stabbed young man, by Emily Case, or by Sarah Marlowe.
    Sarah sat down on the bed with the packet in her lap and laughed till the tears ran down her face.

CHAPTER X
    Sarah slept the sleep of the just. When she woke the burr of the telephone bell was in her ears. With an outspoken comment on people who ring up before eight o’clock in the morning, she emerged upon an icy landing, pulling on the blue dressing-gown as she went. It would be somewhere between half past seven and a quarter to eight, because that was when she always did wake. The thinning gloom at her open window bore out this conjecture.
    The light was on upon the next floor, and when she was half way down the stairs Thompson came