“THEY SAY SHE KILLED HIM”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 March 1941, Page 10

“THEY SAY SHE KILLED HIM”

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

BY

PEARL BELLAIRS.

(Author of “Velvet and Steel,” “Christabel,” etc.)

CHAPTER 111. (Continued',. Hi distress for Peter was beginning to turn into hot resentment; he was no longer at all sorry that he would have to hand that letter over to the coroner. By the time he had located her at the commercial art studio where she worked, and broken the news to Eileen Allen, it was past three o’clock. He sat with her in his car, parked in the Bayswater Road by the railings of Hyde Park. He had told her. And he waited with her now, while she got over it, assembled her wits and her strength sufficiently for- him to drive her home and leave. Her sallow face was dazed with shock, and she shook all over.

She began to cry at last, wiping her eyes on a paint-stained handkerchief. And then she began to talk. “Peter had said he would do it. He often hated life. I don’t blame him. I could do it myself, easily!” “Oh, no, Eileen. You’re made of different stuff!” And Trench believed what he said. He often wondered how she endured her queer, disordered, resentful existence.

“I can’t believe he’s gone. What makes it so awful is that things weren’t the same between us. He’d lost interest in me—and now it can never be as it once was!” “You shouldn't think that. He was tired and depressed, that was all.” Trench lied, looking painfully at the green boughs of the limes sweeping down out of the June sky above the car.

“No, I know it wasn’t the same. I could bear this better if he had loved me still, but for things to be spoiled, and then to end like this! It was her fault —it was her fault!” And suddenly Eileen looked at him with her redrimmed black eyes and said: “Don’t say this was her fault, too?” “Whose?” said Trench, with an odd little shock, knowing all too well. “Valerie Lane’s! Oh, I knew she’d let him down! It was because of her that Peter got tired of me! With her money and clothes and looks, and all the time I knew she just despised him!” Taken aback, Trench said nothing for a moment, sorting things out in his mind. “Peter and I were happy until he met her," Eileen laboured on, woefully. “He met her when we were at a party in the Unicorn Theatre studio. She was there, and he lost interest in me from that moment.” “She was going to see him last night, but she couldn’t go, and sent a telegram instead. So she will be brought into the inquest,” said Trench. “So she had done something, and he was in love with her -!” "No,” said Trench resolutely. “He was not. He told me himself on Saturday night that he regarded her as a friend and nothing more. He told me in so many words that he wasn’t interested in her that way. You've imagined the whole thing—his growing cold towards you, and everything else!”’ His tone was so compelling that he could see the conviction grow in her eyes as she looked at him. He was almost ashamed that his well-meant distortion of the truth should comfort her so much. “Is that true?” she asked tremulously. “Do you think it’s kind or fair to Peter to suspect him of such things now?" countered Trench. She was so anxious to retain her faith in the little happiness she had had that she did not even notice his evasion of her question. She said perhaps he was right, and then started to cry'again. \

Ten minutes later Trench drove her home to her studio in Notting Hill Gate.

Wearily he drove back through the city to the hospital. So he had settled the matter for himself! He didn’t know if there was any penalty for withholding evidence at an inquest, but he would have to risk it. Having re-established Eileen’s faith in Peter —so vain and useless now to anyone but herself—he couldn’t possibly smash it again by disclosing Peter’s letter to him at the inquest.

The letter would have to be burnt and forgotten. His only regret was that in burning it he would be doing a favour to iSr George Lane. But when he was in his room at the hospital, Trench hesitated. He took out the letter and event went so far as to strike the necessary match. But he threw away the match, and with an ominous tightening of his lips, folded the letter back into his notecase. The coroner should not see it. But there was one person who was going to see the letter, and that was Valerie Lane! CHAPTER IV. When Sir George at last burst a way through the entanglements of AngloFrench telephone communication, and got into touch with Valerie in Paris, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. “ Harry Forrestier had arrived at Le Bourget at one-thirty a.m. after hours of tension and excitement. Valerie had gone to bed at half-past three, and slept till noon. She often remembered later how she was laughing when the call came through. There were several people in her room in the Hotel Bellevue.

Her father had never telephoned her when she was abroad before, and she was taken aback. "Vai? Is that yon, Vai? Thank goodness I've got on to you! A most unfortunate thing has happened! You know that boy you mentioned, who had had a book of verse published? He committed suicide. Yes. suicide. Last night down in Hertfordshire.” For a moment it seemed to Valerie impossible to believe. And yet though her mind refused, her body knew it was true. That tight breathlessness in her chest, that weakness striking through every nerve ... 1

"But he couldn't-he didn’t —I can’t believe it!"

But she had to believe it. Sir George told her all the details, how the police had her telegram, how he was afraid it might be mentioned at the inquest. She clung to the phone and listened, while her mind wandered continually round a single point: Peter —Peter was dead!

You'd better come back immediate-

ly.” Sir George told her finally. “Come back now. They might adjourn the inquest for your attendance, and that would draw all the more attention to you. I don’t want any newspaper fuss. This is the most unfortunate thing that could have happened!' Charter a plane if necessary!” It wasn’t necessary. Major West got a seat for her on. a plane leaving with mails at four-thirty. She went without saying goodbye to Forrestier. Somehow she couldn’t do it.

On the way to Croydon she had time to think. In the loneliness of the sky over the channel, clear after rain, as the plane droned steadily towards the misty map of the English coast, she had time to think of what it all meant. Awful to think of such a fate for a stranger. Worse still for a friend. The horrible fear that Peter might not have killed himself if only she had gone down to see him grew and grew in her mind. She thought of him alone in his cottage on Sunday night, humiliated, tortured by his failure, wondering why she had not come. She went straight to her flat, and the first thing she' found there was Peter’s letter. Her maid brought it to her before she had time to take off her coat. The evening paper In which the girl had been reading about the finding of Peter’s body was lying neatly folded on the writing table. Trembling, on the verge of breakdown. Valerie tore open the letter, and found three words: "Goodnight, dear Valerie!”

The pathos of it was a finishing blow to her control, and she burst into tears. So he had not blamed her! Poor Peter, alone, deserted, abandoned so carelessly to his troubles. And yet he

had not blamed her! She picked up the paper and found the brief, sordid little account. But brief as it was, it was all too vivid. The kitchen, the porch, the lonely cottage . . she put aside the paper shuddering. Half an hour later, after ringing her father, and hearing that so far she was not to be called at the inquest, she rang Delfield to know if he knew anything more about Peter. "No, he knew nothing. It seemed to to Valerie that his tone to her was changed. Now there was trouble, she was on a level with the rest, no longer the spoiled darling of smarter intellectual London. "Trench was neurotic and hysterical and the reviews upset him,” he went on. “Of course, I never expected that he'd take it in that way. No one would take a thing like that so hard.” He hesitated, and then asked blandly: "I thought you said you were going down there yesterday evening?”

“Yes, I did: I told Peter I would. But then it turned out that I couldn’t." There was a slight pause, and then Delfield said coolly: “You should have gone.”

It seemed so needless to remind her; but then Valerie understood him. Delfield was shifting the blame on to her, clearing his own conscience, affirming her responsibility so that no one might say he should have done more to save Peter Trench himself. She could imagine that that would be his attitude in talking to everyone about it. She choked and couldn't speak. All she said after that was. "Well, the publicity will sell his book, if that’s the only advantage gained!” She put down the receiver with nerveless fingers, and sat there on her gigantic blue'silk sofa, a small, whitefaced pain-racked figure, her eyes huge with regret, her hair still windblown after the journey from Paris. They would blame her. They would all blarpe her for letting Peter down, blame her because Peter had killed himself. But he had not blamed her! She did not care, as her father did, about shielding herself. She was willing to go into court and tell anything the police wanted to know. It was not that which kept her lying awake all that night. She stayed in the fiat all the next morning, until her father rang her in the afternoon, to tell her the result of the inquest. She knew at once from the tone of his voice that everything had turned cut well so far as he was concerned. “We needn’t have worried,” he said, his voice quick and smooth, and a little) lofty, as though it had been she who I had been anxious. “Brice of Calder and Brice attended for me. and watched the inquiry. He phoned through just now.

"Dr. Trench gave evidence that the young man had always been highly strung and given to fits of depression. "Delfield gave evidence about the reviews, and that young Trench had seemed upset about them when he phoned Delfield on Sunday morning. You were referred to merely as 'a friend' whom Trench was expecting on Sunday evening, who had been unable to come.

"Tile Coroner gave it as his opinion that Trench was of a neurotic and excitable disposition, and being depressed by the reviews of his book, had taken his life in a fit of despair. The jury brought in the usual verdict of suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. Your name was not mentioned!” •He was pleased with the way things had gone. "It was Dr. Trench whom we were afraid of!" he added. (To be continued.)