Dr. Morelle and the Doll. Ernest Dudley
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her husband.
‘You’ll want to cover the ground your father would have taken this afternoon,’ P.C. Jarrett said to him.
‘I went as far as the chalk pit when I went out,’ Charles Hafferty said. ‘Then I turned back. I felt I needed help to look properly.’ He turned to Marie. ‘We won’t be long, we hope.’
She turned suddenly to Jarrett. ‘Can’t I come with you? I can see like a cat in the dark.’
Her husband said quickly: ‘You’re better indoors. Somebody ought to stay with mother.’
‘That’s Olivia’s job,’ Marie said. ‘She’s her daughter, not me.’
‘Will Mr. Parker be coming with us?’ Jarrett said hastily.
‘Not likely,’ Marie snapped. ‘He and his wife took very good care to nip off before you arrived. Tramping about in the dark isn’t Bill Parker’s idea of fun.’
It wasn’t his idea of fun, either, Jarrett thought; a curious sense of oppression filled him, making him feel anxious to get away from this house. An atmosphere of unhappiness had gathered around them as they stood there.
‘If you want rubber boots there’s an extra pair in the kitchen,’ Marie Hafferty was saying to him. ‘I daresay they’d fit you.’
She led the way through the hall. In the large, bright kitchen, where the radio was playing, Bess found the rubber boots and Jarrett pulled them on to replace his own shoes. They came up to his knees and would be useful. There would be a soaking dew for certain. Bess took charge of his shoes and he followed Charles Hafferty out of the kitchen-door. Bess had told him the rubber boots were used by the daily handyman, Alf. P.C. Jarrett knew Alf Layton. ‘Alf s got pretty big feet for a shortish man,’ Bess said, ‘but I daresay they’ll be all right.’
A minute later he and Charles Hafferty were heading towards the orchard, their powerful torch-beams picking out details from the surrounding darkness. They came to the end of the orchard, went through the gate and made for Asshe Woods, and the chalk pit.
CHAPTER FOUR
At 3:30 p.m. that Friday Miss Frayle had kept an appointment with her dentist at the Wigmore Street end of Harley Street. It was a matter of a wisdom tooth which she had been putting off for several weeks; and then it had begun to give her rather more intense pain, and she had forced herself to do something about it.
Tomorrow, Saturday, evening she was accompanying Dr. Morelle on a weekend visit he was making to a friend in Kent, and the last thing she wanted was to have any trouble with the tooth while she was away from London; she had no difficulty at all in picturing Dr. Morelle’s impatience with her if that happened.
This was something she had not failed to point out when she had explained to him why she had to interrupt her work for an hour that afternoon, and he had grumbled that he was in the middle of a batch of notes he wanted to dictate to her.
Miss Frayle had indicated the tape-recorder in the corner of his study and left him to it.
She was terrified at the prospect of visiting the dentist, and made no bones about telling him repeatedly from the moment she took her place in his chair. He smiled at her reassuringly and then began explaining that she would need rather more than a local anaesthetic.
‘Just an intravenous injection,’ he said.
‘You mean, I’ll be unconscious?’ she gulped, the palms of her hands wet with perspiration as she gripped the smooth arms of the chair.
‘You won’t feel a thing,’ he nodded.
Terror flooded her; but almost without her realizing it a white-coated figure had appeared at her side; he was Dr. Someone-or-other, the dentist was murmuring, who as it happened had arrived a little earlier than expected to give a pentathol injection to a patient whose appointment followed Miss Frayle’s.
Miss Frayle fixed him with a sickly smile as the man said: ‘Lucky I was here.’
She remembered reading only that morning a newspaper report of some old woman dying in a dentist’s chair; and then she nearly fainted dead away, as she caught the glint of a hypodermic. Everything was happening so swiftly, so slickly, if only she possessed the courage to make a dash for it. Then she had a mental picture of the mirthless amusement on Dr. Morelle’s sardonic features as he listened to her if she had to tell him what had transpired.
Somehow the picture of him in her mind gave her a kind of desperate courage.
The cool-looking brunette nurse was smiling at her soothingly as her arm was bared, and the anaesthetist was bending over her. She closed her eyes. ‘Start counting,’ a voice was saying. She opened her eyes, she hadn’t felt the hypodermic, but she began counting.
‘One…two…three.…’
Now she couldn’t have kept her overweight eyelids open for a million pounds.
It was somewhere about five-thirty that she had found herself and Dr. Morelle in a first-class compartment of a Southern electric train snaking through the darkness of the winter’s evening, and she tried to puzzle out why they were travelling down to Kent by train, when she had understood earlier that Dr. Morelle would be using the Duesenberg. She leaned forward to speak to Dr. Morelle, wreathed in smoke from his Le Sphinx, but he was too immersed in his book for her to risk interrupting him, and she snuggled back in her corner.
‘We are travelling by train, instead of by car, because our arrival will be less conspicuous.’
For a moment Miss Frayle didn’t grasp that Dr. Morelle was speaking to her. His attention seemed to be concentrated on the page before him, and he did not look up. Then her eyes widened as she realized that he had read her thoughts.
‘Oh,’ was all she had been able to think of to say. She frowned to herself. Why should their arrival have to be so secret? ‘I thought we were just paying a weekend visit—’
He interrupted her, still without looking up from his book. ‘The object of our journey is to meet Tod Hafferty.’
The name had rung a bell. Wasn’t he some actor or something? Miss Frayle dug into her memory. Yes, that was it, he had been a star in prewar British films. He had gone out to Hollywood, where he had proved to be less successful; then he had returned to England to appear less and less frequently in roles of less and less importance. Then no more had been heard of him. A has-been, she indexed him in her mind, that was what he was.
‘But why Tod Hafferty?’ she had said. ‘I never knew he was a friend of yours. Or is he a friend of—?’
Dr. Morelle had put down his book and spoke through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘He is not the only individual with whom I expect to be concerned.’
Miss Frayle blinked at him while he gave his attention back to his book. She couldn’t imagine what possible interest he could have in an ex-film star. Besides, she thought irrelevantly, Tod Hafferty must be at least sixty. She wondered if he was married. She glanced at Dr. Morelle. Was it something to do with Tod Hafferty’s wife? Was that what he had meant by his cryptic remark?
She leaned forward again. ‘Who else, then?’
At that moment the train screamed into a tunnel, and her question was lost. She started to ask it once more, then decided to wait until the train was out of the tunnel. She eyed the solid blackness outside the compartment-window, which threw back her own reflection at her. She shifted her gaze along until it fastened on Dr. Morelle’s reflection.
Then the train was out of the tunnel and the darkness of the night opened out again, the lights of houses, of street-lamps and car headlights racing past formed an enigmatic pattern.
‘Who else, then, Dr. Morelle?’
‘Have you forgotten Carlton?’
She stared at him blankly. His dark gaze narrowed beneath his jutting brows raked her from over the cover of the book he was reading. With a start she saw