The Strange Story of Linda Lee Page 7

Sitting up, she pushed him back. ‘No, darling, no! Please! I want to, too, but I’m not going to let you.’

  Bursting into tears, he knelt down beside the bed, grabbing feebly at her with his hands and sobbing, ‘Linda, my love; please, please! You must, or I’ll go out of my mind.’

  For how long he pleaded with her she could not afterwards remember; but his sobbing tore at her heartstrings as nothing else could have done. Meanwhile she was thinking, ‘We waited for only ten weeks after his first attack, and he is as fit now as he was then. To let him once a month, as we did in the winter, can’t seriously harm him; and if I have that to look forward to, it will free my mind of this awful obsession. He’s right, too, about it being cruel of me to refuse him. After all, if he does have an attack, I know how to deal with it, and could get the doctor here quite quickly.’ So, at length, overcome by compassion for him, she surrendered and said:

  ‘All right then, darling; but for God’s sake, don’t let yourself become too excited.’

  In a moment he had pulled down the sheets and was in bed beside her. Wasting no time in preliminaries, he embraced her and rolled her over on to her back. After that, everything happened very quickly. His breathing had hardly begun to quicken as a result of his amorous assault when, suddenly, he made a choking sound, reared up on her and gave a strangled cry. Then he collapsed and went rigid.

  In awful terror, she called his name, ‘Rowley! Rowley!’ But she already sensed the appalling truth. His body weighed twice as much as it had before. She had a dead man lying on top of her.

  Chapter 6

  Night of Horror

  For a few moments Linda lay still, positively paralysed by horror. She knew that she ought to have thought of the possibility of this happening, to have visualised herself in her present terrible situation. But she had not. She had thought that, at worst, Rowley would be stricken with another attack, that he would go purple in the face and become unconscious just as he had in Venice and Granada. But she had long since learned the first-aid treatment for a coronary. She had only to force him to swallow a couple of the pills the doctor had prescribed for such an emergency, and the worst would be over. Then she would telephone the doctor to come at once. For a few days Rowley would have to remain in bed, and then there would be another period of convalescence. When he had fully recovered, she would make him swear never, never to come to her room again.

  But he was not going to recover. He was dead. She was positive of it.

  Taking Rowley by the shoulders, she exerted all her strength, heaved his heavy body sideways, stretched out an arm and switched on the bedside light. Both their heads were still on the pillow. His face was within six inches of hers and, as the light went on, she found herself looking straight at it.

  Her hand flew up to her mouth to stifle a scream. The face was Rowley’s, but hardly recognisable. It had turned purple, the mouth hung open and seemed to have been wrenched down at one side, the eyes were wide open, bulging and staring straight into hers. Their expression seemed to her to be one of malevolent accusation.

  Closing her eyes to shut out that fearsome sight, she gave a little whimper and began babbling to herself:

  ‘It wasn’t my fault! I didn’t want to. Oh, but I did, and that’s why I gave way. If only Eric hadn’t been so loyal to him this wouldn’t have happened. I’d not have been so weak. No, that’s not true. He wouldn’t have known that I was deceiving him, and would have come up here tonight just the same. And even if Eric had been with me only the night before, I’d have given way. How could I have helped doing so? I let him because I was so sorry for him. That’s the truth. Oh, dear God, believe me! That is the truth, the truth.’

  Suddenly a new thought came to her. Perhaps Rowley was not quite dead. It might be possible to revive him, and she was losing precious moments. Her legs were still entangled with his. Jerking up her knees, she knocked his legs away, rolled over and fell out of bed on to the floor. As she turned over to get up, she saw that one of his naked feet, grotesquely twisted, was hanging over the side of the bed.

  Scrambling to her feet, she staggered over to her dressing table and wrenched open a drawer. When he had again started to come up to her room the previous December, she had made him give her a bottle of his pills to keep there in case he had an attack. Though it had never crossed her mind that it would be an attack such as this.

  Grabbing the bottle, she ran back with it, unscrewed the top and shook two of the pills out into her hand. Rowley’s accusing eyes stared up at her, making her feel sick and faint. One of her handkerchiefs lay on the bedside table. With her free hand she snatched it up and draped it over those awful, protruding orbs. Then she pushed the pills into his twisted mouth. But his tongue was terribly swollen. When she felt its slime on her fingers as she tried to force the pills past it and down his throat, her flesh crept. It was no good. One of them got lodged up in his cheek, the other slipped out.

  For a moment she wondered if she could bring herself to give him the kiss of life. Then she realised that her breath would not get past his tongue. Perhaps, though, through his nose? Nothing, nothing that might revive him must be left untried.

  Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was trembling in every limb. But she steeled herself to the grim task. Stooping over him, she put her hands on his shoulders and her mouth to his nostrils. For over a minute, with rising nausea, she kept it glued there and strove to force her breath into him. His body did not respond by the faintest twitch of a muscle. Suddenly her own body revolted. Jerking away her head, she swivelled round on her knees, her stomach heaved and she was violently sick on the carpet.

  It took her several minutes to recover. Rowley lay sprawled on his back on the bed. Tentatively she put out a hand and placed it over his heart, to make certain that he was really dead. After a moment she became conscious of a faint beating. New hope flamed in her.

  Frantically she began to massage his chest and ribs. The violence of her actions jerked the handkerchief from his eyes. As she knelt above him, his glassy, accusing eyes again stared into hers, but they showed no flicker of intelligence. Nevertheless she continued to work on him until sweat was mingling with the drying tears on her face, and her arms felt as though they would drop out of their sockets. Breathless, she stopped and again laid a hand over his heart. The beating was still faint, but much faster. The devastating explanation for the beating flashed upon her, her face crumpled and tears again sprang to her eyes. It had not been Rowley’s heart that she had felt, but her own racing pulse.

  Brushing aside her tears, she went over to her dressing table again and came back carrying her hand-mirror. As a final test she held it for a full minute over Rowley’s mouth. When she looked at it, there was not a trace of mist. He was dead beyond all question. No longer Rowley, but an ugly corpse.

  Although their doctor could do nothing, she must telephone him. But not yet. Rowley had had many friends who respected him. She owed it to him that they should respect his memory. Some of them might suspect that she had been his mistress, but she could not possibly allow them to think of him as an old lecher who had died in the act of making love to a girl young enough to be his daughter. Doctors did not gossip about their patients, but the body would have to be moved. As far as she knew, if Stefano and Bella believed Rowley to have been her lover they had, from fear of dismissal, kept it to themselves; and she was on excellent terms with both of them. But now that Rowley was dead, they might feel free to talk. Somehow she must get his body down to his own room.

  Having wriggled into her dressing gown and opened the door, she put her arms round the body and tried to lift it from the bed. It was far heavier than she had expected, and seemed to weigh a ton. Strong as she was, she realised that she had not the strength to carry it. For some minutes she stared at it in dismay. Then an idea came to her. Kneeling down beside the bed, she drew one of the limp arms across her shoulders and round the back of her neck. Exerting all her strength, she levered herself up with the corpse on he
r back in a fireman’s lift. Clutching the dangling legs to her with her free hand, she staggered out into the passage. Halfway down it, her burden proved too heavy for her; she sank to her knees and let it slide to the floor.

  When she recovered from her effort, she again attempted to get the body across her shoulders, but could not manage it. She began to weep, but now from anger. In desperation, regardless of treating the corpse with indignity, she took it by the ankles and drew it in jerks along the passage.

  When she had hauled it some way she stepped back on to one of the Persian rugs that partially covered the polished parquet floor. As she pulled hard again, the rug slid from beneath her feet and she went over backward, coming down with a resounding thud.

  For a few moments she remained where she had fallen, now petrified by a new fear. Stefano and Bella slept on the floor above. If either of them chanced to be awake, he or she must have heard the noise of her heavy fall, and wondered what had caused it. Holding her breath, she listened for the door of their bedroom to open, dreading that, within a minute, one of them would have switched on the light and be peering over the banister, to see her crouching there beside Rowley’s sprawling, naked body.

  When she could hold her breath no longer, she let it rush from her lungs, by then reassured that the servants must be fast asleep. Her heart still beating furiously, she got to her feet, again grasped Rowley’s ankles and dragged him to the head of the stairs. Having straightened the rug, she returned to the corpse and, going down the stairs in front of it, alternately pulled at and checked it until she had it lying on the third step from the bottom. Now, kneeling down, she was able to get it on her back once more.

  Staggering drunkenly under its weight, she carried it to the door of Rowley’s room. Fortunately the door was ajar. Kicking it open, with a gasp of relief, she dropped the body inside, then switched on the light.

  Rowley’s bed had not been slept in. Going to it, she rumpled the pillows and pulled down the sheets until they were in disarray. She had intended to get the body up on to the bed, but decided that, when discovered, it would look more realistic if it appeared that he had fallen out; so she dragged it to a position alongside the bed. As she arranged the limbs suitably, nausea welled up in her again. But she knew that she must not be sick in that room, and fought it down. Her grim and grisly task completed, she switched off the light and hurried out into the passage.

  Instead of returning to her bedroom, she went down to the study. The glasses they had drunk from earlier in the night were on a small table with the bottle of brandy. It had been nearly full, but was now two-thirds empty; so, to get up his courage, Rowley must have consumed over half the bottle before going up to her.

  Picking up the bottle, she sloshed a good portion into a tumbler, then splashed in a little soda and drank it straight down. The potent draught took her breath away, but it warmed her inside and made her feel better. Her hand reached out for the bottle again, but she drew it back. In her present state, if she drank what remained, it might make her tight, and that would be fatal. To play this grim game out, she must keep all her wits about her.

  Five minutes later she was back in her bedroom. There could be no question of ringing up the doctor now. She was not supposed to know about Rowley’s death, and must appear not to until Stefano found his body and came to tell her in the morning.

  To her surprise and distress she saw from the French clock on the mantelpiece that it was not yet a quarter to two. It seemed impossible that so much had happened in so short a time. But they had been home by half past eleven, and it could not have been much more than an hour and a quarter later that Rowley had come up to her room. So all this ghastly business had taken place in less than an hour.

  That meant that she had over six hours to wait until the next act in the drama. Stefano called Rowley with a cup of China tea at eight o’clock, so it would be a few minutes after that when he would come up to tell her of his master’s death. Six hours seemed an eternity. How she was going to get through them she could not think.

  She remade the bed after clearing up the mess she had made beside it then decided to have a bath. The beautiful bathroom had long ceased to be a marvel to her. But as she ran the bath she did wonder how long it would remain hers.

  From the moment of Rowley’s seizure, her mind had been so occupied that this was the first time a thought about her future had entered it. As she got into the bath and lay down to relax in the warm water, she began to ponder the possibilities. She thought it unlikely that Rowley had left her the house and its contents, because quite a lot of the furniture had belonged to his wife, so would go to Elsie; but she felt sure that he had made ample provison for herself.

  She would have to start a new life, and she would miss Rowley terribly. But after a while she would get over her loss. He had made her life what it was, taken her from poverty and uncertainty to affluence and security, so she would always think of him with the deepest gratitude. But now that he was gone, she was free to marry; so it was doubly infuriating that, before going abroad, Eric had refused to let them know to which Embassy he had been posted. His real reason, she felt sure, had been to prevent her writing, and so continuing to think about him. But perhaps she could find out from the Foreign Office where he had gone. Somehow she must do so. But what evil luck that, by her own folly, she had driven him abroad and now needed him so badly to lean upon!

  When she had got out of the bath and dried herself it was still only three o’clock. Half the night still lay before her, so she took two sleeping pills. But they did not work. Again and again, as she was about to doze off, she roused with a shudder of terror, having seen Rowley’s bloated face only a few feet away, standing out against the surrounding darkness like a ghastly, purplish balloon. The protruding eyes were no longer accusing, but leered at her, and the twisted mouth now seemed to bear a malicious grin as though the animating spirit of this horror wished her ill and knew some secret that would bring about her ruin. Yet she could not believe for one moment that Rowley’s spirit wished her harm. Not only had he always been most kind and generous, but he owed it to her that the last two years of his life had been extremely happy ones. She knew that the hostility she saw in the distorted face was purely imaginary and due to her nerves having been stretched almost to breaking point.

  All the same, when another vision of this revolting face again caused her to start up from a doze, she felt that she could bear it no longer. Switching on the light, she got out of bed to fetch her library book which she had left with her handbag on the writing table. As she came back with it, her glance fell on Rowley’s dressing gown. Having taken it off in the dark, he had thrown it aside and it had fallen behind a small armchair that stood against the wall between the bed and the door.

  As she picked it up, she groaned. She dared not keep it in her room, and the thought of having to take it down to his filled her with new dread. The travesty of his face that had haunted her for the past two hours or more must surely emanate from his dead body. If she took the dressing gown to his room, she could not just open the door and throw it inside. She would have to switch on the light and lay the gown in some appropriate place. That meant that she could not avoid seeing Rowley’s twisted corpse again.

  Yet she knew there was no escape from this new ordeal. Steeling herself to face it, she crept downstairs, but paused before Rowley’s door for a full minute. With her nightmare visions still fresh in her mind, she was gripped by the fear that when she opened the door some awful thing would seize and drag her in. At length, summoning all her resolution, she threw the dressing gown over her shoulders, so as to have both hands free. With one, she grasped the handle, turned it and flung the door wide open; with the other, almost simultaneously, she found the light switch and snapped it down.

  The room was exactly as she had left it and immediately all fear of the supernatural left her. Rowley’s sprawled body lay face upward beside the bed, and she found herself looking down on it quite calmly. The suffus
ed face was an unpleasant sight, but the eyes now seemed blank, and held no trace of either accusation or malice. Unhurriedly she dropped the dressing gown over the back of a chair at the foot of the bed, turned out the light and closed the door behind her.

  Relieved though she was, reaction swiftly set in. Her head ached and her mouth felt parched. She would have given anything for a large cup of strong coffee, and thought of going down to to the kitchen to make herself one; but decided that it would be wiser not to, as dawn had come. Daylight was seeping through the gaps between the curtains and soon the servants would be getting up.

  Instead, she went down to the study and finished the bottle of brandy. Stefano would know that the previous evening it had been a nearly full one, and the more Rowley was believed to have drunk, the better that would account for his seizure. That thought gave her an idea. Picking up the empty bottle and Rowley’s glass, she went back to his room, set the bottle on his bedside table and laid the glass on the floor a foot away from his outflung hand.

  As she was going upstairs, she heard a door on the top floor open and close. Her heart missed a beat. In another moment the Luchenis would be coming down. In an agony of apprehension she ran lightly up the last few stairs then, hugging the wall of the passage, tiptoed along to her room. As she closed the door noiselessly behind her, she found that sweat had broken out on her forehead and that her hands were damp. Closing her eyes, she thanked God for her narrow escape.

  As soon as she had recovered, she went to the window and drew the curtains. In the early-morning light, the outlook over Regent’s Park was as lovely as ever. For nearly two and a half years she had enjoyed that vista. Soon now she would be deprived of it, and never see it again. It was only one of the many things she owed to Rowley and must lose by his death. Sadly she redrew the curtains and got into bed. The servants would make their own breakfast and tidy up downstairs before Stefano brought Rowley his morning tea, so she must resign herself to another hour of waiting, for there was no hope of her dropping off to sleep.