The policeman hurried indoors and soon I heard him at the telephone. I was surprised that none of the rest of our party had been roused by the banging of the basement door, the smashing of glass, the voices outside and the general running to and fro. But they were all of them young and healthy, I reflected, and the previous night had been a broken one.
The ambulance drew up at the gate, and two attendants came in with a stretcher. They lifted her gently and bore her away. We all drew a breath of relief as the car slid smoothly down the road.
The constable resumed his tunic. “Drunken old beast,” he said, “she’ll pull through, you see if she don’t and if she’d bin a good woman with a loving ’usband and three or four nice little kids, she’d ’a’ conked out. That’s the way it is, ’er sort takes a lot o’ killing. Well, sir, I’d better take a look round, then I must write up my report and be off.”
Janet ran down the steps as he spoke. “Come in and have some tea before you go, I’ve just made some in the dining-room.”
So we went in and sat at the big table. Janet had made the tea with Ethel’s spirit-lamp and had hunted up a tin of biscuits. Never was a midnight snack more welcome. But what a strangely assorted little group it was. The policeman, solid and comfortable in appearance, but amusingly ill at ease, fingering a note-book which he had extracted from the inner recesses of his tunic—what were the thoughts, I wondered, slowly penetrating the brain behind his good-tempered face, as he thanked Janet awkwardly for his biscuits and his tea! Janet, ah, Janet, how piquant and dainty you looked and what a contrast to that other horrible figure on which my gaze had been concentrated for the last half-hour or more; Janet might have been a lifelong inmate of the house and our tea an afternoon affair of gossip, maid-attended and cake-stand beflanked, so easily and pleasantly she chatted. But what were your thoughts, Janet, as you asked the doctor with a smile if his tea was as he liked it? The Tundish! If his thoughts could have been read, how eagerly I should have scanned the page, expecting to read of devil-driven treachery or heroic unselfish optimism, I know not which. And myself, distrusting the doctor and liking him at once, tolerant of the blue-coated limb of the law, wishing them both in Hades, Dalehouse and its recurrent gruesome happenings a thing of the past, and Janet and I alone together in some sheltered peat-scented nook on the moors where I might hope to stir in her an answering thrill to my own!
The constable set down his cup and rose.
“Thank you, miss,” he said, “that’s done me a power o’ good. And now I must have a look round and get back to my beat.”
We went down to the basement with him. Janet had set all the doors wide open while we had been working over cook, and the atmosphere was breathable once more.
“Was the kitchen door shut, miss?”
“Yes, and the door into the scullery too.”