Mr. Trevor could not resist looking down to his feet. The corpses were of two youngish men in dress-clothes.
“They’re cut badly,” said Mr. Maturin.
“They’re not cut at all,” said the woman harshly. “I shot these two for a change.”
“I meant their clothes,” Mr. Maturin explained. “Death was too good for them with dress-clothes like that.”
“Well, I can’t stop here all night talking about clothes,” snapped the woman. “Now then, to business. These bodies have to be buried in the back-garden. You will each take one. There are spades just behind you. I shall not have the slightest hesitation in killing you as I have killed these two, but it will be more convenient for me if you do as you are told. I may kill you later, and I may not. Now be quick!”
“Lord, what’s that!” cried Mr. Trevor sharply. He had that moment realised a strange muffled, ticking noise which must, he thought, come either from somewhere in the room or from a room nearby. And, while he was never in his life less conscious of feeling fear, he could not help but be startled by that ticking noise, for he had heard it before, when timing a dynamite-bomb.
“That is why,” the woman explained with what, Mr. Trevor supposed, was meant to be a smile, “you will be safer in the garden. Women are but weak creatures, and so I take the precaution of having a rather large size in dynamite-bombs so timed that I have but to press a button to send us all to blazes. It will not be comfortable for the police when, if ever, they catch me. But pick up those spades and get busy.”
“Now don’t be rude,” begged Beau Maturin. “I can stand anything from plain women but discourtesy. Ralph, you take the bigger corpse, as you are smaller than I am, while I take this little fellow on my shoulder—which will probably be the nearest he will ever get to heaven, with clothes cut as badly as that.”
“You can come back for the bodies when you’ve dug the graves,” snapped the woman. “Take the spades and go along that passage. No tricks! I am just behind you.”
There was a lot of rubbish in that garden. It had never been treated as a garden, it did not look like a garden, it looked even less like a garden than did The Garden of My Grandmother. High walls enclosed it. And over it that deplorable moon threw a sheet of dead daylight.