The hotel I was staying in was a poky little place by the station. It served a decent grill2 but thatwas all that could be said for it. Except, of course, that it was cheap.
At ten o’clock the following morning I rang the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau and said that Iwanted a shorthand typist to take down some letters and retype a business agreement. My namewas Douglas Weatherby and I was staying at the Clarendon Hotel (extraordinarily tatty3 hotelsalways have grand names). Was Miss Sheila Webb available? A friend of mine had found her veryefficient.
I was in luck. Sheila could come straight away. She had, however, an appointment at twelveo’clock. I said that I would have finished with her well before that as I had an appointment myself.
I was outside the swing doors of the Clarendon when Sheila appeared. I stepped forward.
“Mr. Douglas Weatherby at your service,” I said.
“Was it you rang up?”
“It was.”
“But you can’t do things like that.” She looked scandalized.
“Why not? I’m prepared to pay the Cavendish Bureau for your services. What does it matter tothem if we spend your valuable and expensive time in the Buttercup Café just across the streetinstead of dictating4 dull letters beginning ‘Yours of the 3rd prontissimo to hand,’ etc. Come on,let’s go and drink indifferent coffee in peaceful surroundings.”
The Buttercup Café lived up to its name by being violently and aggressively yellow. Formicatabletops, plastic cushions and cups and saucers were all canary colour.
I ordered coffee and scones5 for two. It was early enough for us to have the place practically toourselves.
When the waitress had taken the order and gone away, we looked across the table at each other.
“Are you all right, Sheila?”
“What do you mean—am I all right?”
Her eyes had such dark circles under them that they looked violet rather than blue.
“Have you been having a bad time?”
“Yes—no—I don’t know. I thought you had gone away?”
“I had. I’ve come back.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
Her eyes dropped.
“I’m afraid of him,” she said after a pause of at least a minute, which is a long time.
“Who are you afraid of?”
“That friend of yours—that inspector6. He thinks … he thinks I killed that man, and that I killedEdna too….”
“Oh, that’s just his manner,” I said reassuringly7. “He always goes about looking as though hesuspected everybody.”
“No, Colin, it’s not like that at all. It’s no good saying things just to cheer me up. He’s thoughtthat I had something to do with it right from the beginning.”
“My dear girl, there’s no evidence against you. Just because you were there on the spot that day,because someone put you on the spot….”
She interrupted.
“He thinks I put myself on the spot. He thinks it’s all a trumped-up story. He thinks that Edna insome way knew about it. He thinks that Edna recognized my voice on the telephone pretending tobe Miss Pebmarsh.”
“Was it your voice?” I asked.
“No, of course it wasn’t. I never made that telephone call. I’ve always told you so.”
“Look here, Sheila,” I said. “Whatever you tell anyone else, you’ve got to tell me the truth.”
“So you don’t believe a word I say!”
“Yes, I do. You might have made that telephone call that day for some quite innocent reason.
Someone may have asked you to make it, perhaps told you it was part of a joke, and then you gotscared and once you’d lied about it, you had to go on lying. Was it like that?”
“No, no, no! How often have I got to tell you?”
“It’s all very well, Sheila, but there’s something you’re not telling me. I want you to trust me. IfHardcastle has got something against you, something that he hasn’t told me about—”
She interrupted again.
“Do you expect him to tell you everything?”
“Well, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t. We’re roughly members of the same profession.”
The waitress brought our order at this point. The coffee was as pale as the latest fashionableshade of mink8.
“I didn’t know you had anything to do with the police,” Sheila said, slowly stirring her coffeeround and round.
“It’s not exactly the police. It’s an entirely9 different branch. But what I was getting at was, thatif Dick doesn’t tell me things he knows about you, it’s for a special reason. It’s because he thinksI’m interested in you. Well, I am interested in you. I’m more than that. I’m for you, Sheila,whatever you’ve done. You came out of that house that day scared to death. You were reallyscared. You weren’t pretending. You couldn’t have acted a part the way you did.”
“Of course I was scared. I was terrified.”
“Was it only finding the dead body that scared you? Or was there something else?”
“What else should there be?”
I braced10 myself.
“Why did you pinch that clock with Rosemary written across it?”
“What do you mean? Why should I pinch it?”
“I’m asking you why you did.”
“I never touched it.”
“You went back into that room because you’d left your gloves there, you said. You weren’twearing any gloves that day. A fine September day. I’ve never seen you wear gloves. All rightthen, you went back into that room and you picked up that clock. Don’t lie to me about that.
That’s what you did, isn’t it?”
She was silent for a moment or two, crumbling11 up the scones on her plate.
“All right,” she said in a voice that was almost a whisper. “All right. I did. I picked up the clockand I shoved it into my bag and I came out again.”
“But why did you do it?”
“Because of the name—Rosemary. It’s my name.”
“Your name is Rosemary, not Sheila?”
“It’s both. Rosemary Sheila.”
“And that was enough, just that? The fact that you’d the same name as was written on one ofthose clocks?”
She heard my disbelief, but she stuck to it.
“I was scared, I tell you.”
I looked at her. Sheila was my girl—the girl I wanted—and wanted for keeps. But it wasn’t anyuse having illusions about her. Sheila was a liar12 and probably always would be a liar. It was herway of fighting for survival—the quick easy glib13 denial. It was a child’s weapon—and she’dprobably never got out of using it. If I wanted Sheila I must accept her as she was—be at hand toprop up the weak places. We’ve all got our weak places. Mine were different from Sheila’s butthey were there.
I made up my mind and attacked. It was the only way.
“It was your clock, wasn’t it?” I said. “It belonged to you?”
She gasped14.
“How did you know?”
“Tell me about it.”
The story tumbled out then in a helter-skelter of words. She’d had the clock nearly all her life.
Until she was about six years old she’d always gone by the name of Rosemary—but she hated itand had insisted on being called Sheila. Lately the clock had been giving trouble. She’d taken itwith her to leave at a clock-repairing shop not far from the Bureau. But she’d left it somewhere—in the bus, perhaps, or in the milk bar where she went for a sandwich at lunchtime.
“How long was this before the murder at 19, Wilbraham Crescent?”
About a week, she thought. She hadn’t bothered much, because the clock was old and alwaysgoing wrong and it would really be better to get a new one.
And then:
“I didn’t notice it at first,” she said. “Not when I went into the room. And then I—found thedead man. I was paralysed. I straightened up after touching15 him and I just stood there staring andmy clock was facing me on a table by the fire—my clock—and there was blood on my hand—andthen she came in and I forgot everything because she was going to tread on him. And—and so—Ibolted. To get away—that’s all I wanted.”
I nodded.
“And later?”
“I began to think. She said she hadn’t telephoned for me—then who had—who’d got me thereand put my clock there? I—I said that about leaving gloves and—and stuffed it into my bag. Isuppose it was—stupid of me.”
“You couldn’t have done anything sillier,” I told her. “In some ways, Sheila, you’ve got nosense at all.”
“But someone is trying to involve me. That postcard. It must have been sent by someone whoknows I took that clock. And the postcard itself—the Old Bailey. If my father was a criminal—”
“What do you know about your father and mother?”
“My father and mother died in an accident when I was a baby. That’s what my aunt told me,what I’ve always been told. But she never speaks about them, she never tells me anything aboutthem. Sometimes, once or twice when I asked, she’s told me things about them that aren’t thesame as what she’s told me before. So I’ve always known, you see, that there’s something wrong.”
“Go on.”
“So I think that perhaps my father was some kind of criminal—perhaps even, a murderer. Orperhaps it was my mother. People don’t say your parents are dead and can’t or won’t tell youanything about those parents, unless the real reason is something—something that they thinkwould be too awful for you to know.”
“So you got yourself all worked up. It’s probably quite simple. You may just have been anillegitimate child.”
“I thought of that, too. People do sometimes try and hide that kind of thing from children. It’svery stupid. They’d much better just tell them the real truth. It doesn’t matter as much nowadays.
But the whole point is, you see, that I don’t know. I don’t know what’s behind all this. Why was Icalled Rosemary? It’s not a family name. It means remembrance, doesn’t it?”
“Which could be a nice meaning,” I pointed16 out.
“Yes, it could … But I don’t feel it was. Anyway, after the inspector had asked me questionsthat day, I began to think. Why had someone wanted to get me there? To get me there with astrange man who was dead? Or was it the dead man who had wanted me to meet him there? Washe, perhaps—my father, and he wanted me to do something for him? And then someone had comealong and killed him instead. Or did someone want to make out from the beginning that it was Iwho had killed him? Oh, I was all mixed up, frightened. It seemed somehow as if everything wasbeing made to point at me. Getting me there, and a dead man and my name—Rosemary—on myown clock that didn’t belong there. So I got in a panic and did something that was stupid, as yousay.”
I shook my head at her.
“You’ve been reading or typing too many thrillers17 and mystery stories,” I said accusingly.
“What about Edna? Haven’t you any idea at all what she’d got into her head about you? Why didshe come all the way to your house to talk to you when she saw you every day at the office?”
“I’ve no idea. She couldn’t have thought I had anything to do with the murder. She couldn’t.”
“Could it have been something she overheard and made a mistake about?”
“There was nothing, I tell you. Nothing!”
I wondered. I couldn’t help wondering … Even now, I didn’t trust Sheila to tell the truth.
“Have you got any personal enemies? Disgruntled young men, jealous girls, someone or other abit unbalanced who might have it in for you?”
It sounded most unconvincing as I said it.
“Of course not.”
So there it was. Even now I wasn’t sure about that clock. It was a fantastic story. 413. What didthose figures mean? Why write them on a postcard with the word: REMEMBER unless theywould mean something to the person to whom the postcard was sent?
I sighed, paid the bill and got up.
“Don’t worry,” I said. (Surely the most fatuous18 words in the English or any other language.)“The Colin Lamb Personal Service is on the job. You’re going to be all right, and we’re going tobe married and live happily ever after on practically nothing a year. By the way,” I said, unable tostop myself, though I knew it would have been better to end on the romantic note, but the ColinLamb Personal Curiosity drove me on. “What have you actually done with that clock? Hidden it inyour stocking drawer?”
She waited just a moment before she said:
“I put it in the dustbin of the house next door.”
I was quite impressed. It was simple and probably effective. To think of that had been clever ofher. Perhaps I had underestimated Sheila.
点击
收听单词发音
收听单词发音 |
1
narrative
|
|
| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
2
grill
|
|
| n.烤架，铁格子，烤肉；v.烧，烤，严加盘问 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
3
tatty
|
|
| adj.不整洁的，简陋的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
4
dictating
|
|
| v.大声讲或读( dictate的现在分词 )；口授；支配；摆布 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
5
scones
|
|
| n.烤饼，烤小圆面包( scone的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
6
inspector
|
|
| n.检查员，监察员，视察员 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
7
reassuringly
|
|
| ad.安心，可靠 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
8
mink
|
|
| n.貂，貂皮 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
9
entirely
|
|
| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
10
braced
|
|
| adj.拉牢的v.支住( brace的过去式和过去分词 )；撑牢；使自己站稳；振作起来 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
11
crumbling
|
|
| adj.摇摇欲坠的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
12
liar
|
|
| n.说谎的人 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
13
glib
|
|
| adj.圆滑的，油嘴滑舌的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
14
gasped
|
|
| v.喘气( gasp的过去式和过去分词 )；喘息；倒抽气；很想要 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
15
touching
|
|
| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
16
pointed
|
|
| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
17
thrillers
|
|
| n.紧张刺激的故事( thriller的名词复数 )；戏剧；令人感到兴奋的事；（电影）惊悚片 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
18
fatuous
|
|
| adj.愚昧的；昏庸的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
| 欢迎访问英文小说网 |