And then, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, she would be awakened by the now familiar sounds of Agatha Cheale talking in her sleep, and, after a short battle with herself, she would creep down to the floor below and listen to the unseen speaker rehearsing the evidence she meant to give when in the witness-box at Harry Garlett’s trial for his life.
But what to the secret listener was so strange, as well as bitterly disappointing, was that Agatha Cheale’s monologue scarcely altered at all, from night to night. The suggestions, assertions, indignant denials and admissions, would be repeated again and again, in almost exactly the same form of words. Indeed, as night followed night, there came a maddening monotony about Jean Bower’s furtive eavesdropping expeditions down to the dark landing.
Lying awake after she had again crept into her bed, Jean would ask herself if there was any truth in the suggestion that a stranger had broken his way into the Thatched House on that fatal Saturday afternoon? And always she had to agree with shrewd Mrs. Lightfoot that there had been no stranger there. He was an invention, and a poor invention at that, of Agatha Cheale.
From seven each morning Jean Bower turned into Bet Chart, “help” to the good-natured, talkative, monstrously fat woman of whom the poor girl found herself getting fond, in a sort of way.
Now and again the “help” would hide herself behind the door of the empty front room on the ground floor to see the young lady who was the subject of so much interest and speculation to every one in the house, pass through the gloomy hall.
Agatha Cheale was exceptionally well dressed, generally in a well-cut blue serge coat and skirt, a handsome fur tippet, and a smart little toque on her dark hair. She had always been pale, and now her face looked absolutely bloodless. There were deep, dark rings under her eyes—those eyes which were the only beautiful feature of her thin, strong face.
Late each morning Bet Chart tidied Miss Cheale’s sitting room, and “did” her bedroom; and when quite sure that Mrs. Lightfoot would not make an unexpected appearance, she would ashamedly open the drawers in the ramshackle dressing-table, and try the lid of the shabby old dispatch box which stood close to Miss Cheale’s bed. But the box had a patent lock, and its owner wore the key night and day, according to Mrs. Lightfoot.
As to the sitting room, it was bare and comfortless. On the big, plain writing table stood a typewriter, and to its right a wad of blotting paper, and a box of good notepaper and envelopes to match. A bookcase full of books did something to humanize the room. But Miss Cheale only used the room as a place in which to have her tray meals, and when she received her infrequent visitors.
And then, just nine days before what was to be the opening day of Harry Garlett’s trial, Jean Bower did obtain conclusive evidence concerning the authorship of the anonymous letters which had first started the investigation.
She had finished dusting Miss Cheale’s tidy, bare, little sitting room when some sudden instinct made her do what she had never done before. She moved, that is, the heavy typewriter which stood on the writing-table.