Fear by Night

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Fear by Night

Patricia Wentworth

CHAPTER I

Elias Paulett sat in an upper room of his house in Glasgow and sipped from a tumbler of hot whisky and water. He was a very old man, and a very rich man, and a very successful man, but no one had ever loved him very much. It was now a great many years since anyone had loved him at all. It must be frankly confessed that he was not lovable. He had made his own way from poverty to riches, laying the foundation of his present very large fortune when, at the age of twenty-six, he married the daughter and heiress of Duncan Robertson, whose small proprietary line of steamers is now, like poor Jessie Robertson, quite forgotten. Elias Paulett used them, broke them, and went on.

He sat now, clasping his steaming tumbler and occasionally casting a glance of sardonic amusement at his great-niece, Hilda Paulett, who was reading aloud to him from
The Times
. She was a handsome girl in the late twenties. Her discontented dark eyes and the set of her full, sulky mouth proclaimed the fact that she was not interested in the City news.

Elias Paulett put out his hand and stopped her.

“That'll do. Anderson'll be back by now. I want to see him.” He went on sipping and smiling to himself. It was not at all a pleasant smile.

Hilda Paulett went out of the room with an air of relief.

Presently the door opened again and Gale Anderson came in. He was a fair, good-looking young man of thirty-three or thirty-four. He had rather the look of having been a great deal indoors. His skin, and his eyes, and his hair were all a little paler than they ought to have been. He had the controlled manner which was natural in one who had been Elias Paulett's secretary for more than three years.

“Miss Paulett said you wanted me, sir.”

Elias nodded. His thick, bushy white hair stood up in tufts, giving him something of the appearance of a cockatoo. His face was a mass of small puckered wrinkles out of which his deep-set grey eyes looked sharply.

“Yes, yes—Miss Paulett,” he said—“my niece, Hilda Paulett. Do you call her Hilda?”

If Gale Anderson felt perturbed, he did not show it. He smiled very slightly.

“Well, sir, we've known each other for three years.”

“You do, then?”

“Well, yes, sir.”

“Ever kiss her?” said Elias Paulett.

Gale Anderson shrugged his shoulders.

“What do you expect me to say to that, sir?”

“Are you in love with her?”

“Or to that, sir?”

Elias Paulett looked at him with bright, wicked eyes.

“You might lie, or you might tell the truth. I'll save you the trouble, young man. You're putting your money on the wrong horse. I'd hate to see you fall down.”

Gale Anderson's face showed nothing but perplexity.

“I'm afraid I don't know what you mean, sir.”

“Oh yes, you do. You're not a fool, or I'd have fired you long ago. I'm telling you that you've put your money on the wrong horse.”

“And I'm telling you, sir, that I don't know what you mean.”

Elias Paulett set down the tumbler on the table at his elbow and pulled himself up a little in his chair. He wore a quilted dressing-gown of dark blue silk and had across his knees a plaid rug of Royal Stuart tartan.

“I wasn't asleep last night.”

“I really do not know what you mean, sir,” said Gale Anderson.

Elias Paulett laughed.

“You've a good poker face! I wasn't asleep last night when Hilda came up behind you and kissed you.”

“I think you must have been dreaming, sir,” said Gale Anderson.

“Dreaming, was I?” Elias swung round and pointed at the writing-table. “You were sitting there writing, and she came in and had a look at me. Then she said, ‘He's asleep,' and she went across and leaned down over you with her arm round your neck and kissed you. And now perhaps you think I'm going to ask you your intentions. I'm not. I'm not going to ask you anything—not even how many times you've kissed her, or when you kissed her first, or whether it's stopped at kissing. I'm not going to ask you anything—I'm going to tell you something. You're putting your money on the wrong horse, and I'm going to tell you why. Someone's been making you believe I've left my money to Hilda. Well, I haven't. No—stand where I can see you and put that other light on! How's that poker face of yours? Let's have a look.”

Gale Anderson was certainly very pale, but he had been so pale before that it was impossible to say whether he was paler now. There was a pendant light in the middle of the room. He touched the switch which lit a couple of brackets over the mantelpiece and turned to face his employer.

“It's very good of you to tell me all this, sir.”

“Yes, isn't it?” said Elias with a grim twist of the mouth. “I've been good to myself all my life, and I'm keeping right on. I don't want you and Hilda to be thinking it's time I was out of the way, and maybe giving me a helping hand. I'll die when I'm due to die and not before.” He took a bunch of keys out of his dressing-gown pocket and flung them on the floor. “If you'll open the third drawer on the left of the table you'll find the draft of my will. The original is in my lawyer's safe where no one can get at it. You can go through the draft at your leisure, unless you like to take my word for what's in it. I've got another great-niece besides Hilda—her name's Ann Vernon—and I've left my money to her. I've never seen her, because I quarrelled with her mother before she was born. If I saw her, I should probably dislike her as much as I dislike Hilda. At present I don't, so I've left her my money—provided she outlives me. If she doesn't, Hilda gets it. But I shouldn't waste my time making love to her on the off chance.” He picked up his tumbler and drained it.” Don't you want to read the draft?”

“I don't really feel it's my business, sir,” said Gale Anderson.

“Willing to take my word for it, are you? All right—I don't want you any more. You'd better go and tell Hilda she's wasting her time too. You'll both need to marry money, so you'd best go courting where it's to be had. There's nothing coming to either of you from me, unless my niece Ann manages to smash herself up before I'm through.”

Gale Anderson went out of the room without haste. He found Hilda Paulett in her own sitting-room on the ground floor. It was a dingy place and dingily furnished—old chairs that had been cast from the drawing-room; curtains of faded repp; a Brussels carpet whose pattern had almost disappeared; and an aged piano with flutings of discoloured green silk.

She looked up as he came in, and his face frightened her.

“Oh, Gale! What is it?” she said.

He shut the door and leaned against it. It was a minute before he spoke. When he did so, his voice was under control.

“Why did you lie to me about the will?”

The colour flew into her face.

“I didn't!”

“I think you did. You told me he'd left his money to you.”

“
Hasn't he?
” The words came with a gasp.

Gale Anderson leaned against the door. He said coolly and quietly,

“What made you think he had?”

She came a step or two towards him and then stopped, twisting her hands, her colour coming and going and her breath uneven.

“Gale—what's happened? You don't tell me. Has he altered his will? I saw the draft. I swear the money was left to me—I swear it!”

“You saw the draft?”

“I swear I did! It was the day he signed the will. When Mr. Everard had gone, Uncle Elias gave me his keys, and he said, ‘This is the draft of my will. I'm keeping it for reference. Put it in the third drawer of the writing-table, and mind you lock the drawer.' So I went over to the table, and whilst I was putting it away he had a most frightful fit of coughing, and I thought I'd take a look and see if I could find out what he was doing with the money. His chair was turned round to the fire, so I was right behind him.”

“Go on,” said Gale Anderson.

“I got the paper open, and it was all that awful lawyer's language, but I made out that he was leaving everything to ‘my great niece,' and then it got down to the bottom of the page and I didn't dare turn over, so I put it away quickly and locked it up and gave him back the key. That was good enough, wasn't it?”

Gale Anderson straightened himself up and came towards her. He took her by the shoulder, and she looked up at him in a puzzled, frightened way.

“Those words, ‘my great-niece,' came at the bottom of the page?”

Hilda nodded.

“What's wrong—what's happened?”

With a turn of the wrist he pushed her away.

“You fool! Didn't you know he had another great-niece?”

She stumbled against the piano and caught at it to steady herself.

“Oh! You hurt me!”

“Do you expect me to say I'm sorry? You blazing fool! Did you hear what I said? There's another niece, and you don't get a penny.”

She looked up wide-eyed, her full lips trembling.

“Gale—you didn't marry me for that? Gale, I didn't know—I swear I didn't! Oh,
Gale
!”

He said, “Be quiet!” and went to the fireplace and stood there looking down at the dusty paper between the bars.

She watched him, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief and every now and then drawing a quick breath as if she wanted to speak but lacked the courage. When at last he turned round, the words broke out.

“Oh, Gale, are you sure? Don't I get anything?”

“Not unless something happens to Miss Ann Vernon,” said Gale Anderson.

CHAPTER II

Ann Vernon came up the steps of the Luxe with her chin in the air. If Charles Anstruther had been waiting for her, he would have reflected with a little stab of amused admiration that it was just like Ann to look as if she had bought the earth, in a dress which even to the male eye was tolerably out of date, and to cock her hat at an extravagant angle just because it had obviously borne the heat and burden of the summer.