Walk with Care by Patricia Wentworth Page A

bed on a January night to come barefoot to Mannister’s library with the key of the safe in her hand? She was in a dream, but her dream took its form from facts that were stranger than any dream. It was like a mist that keeps the shape of the hill it veils. In her dream the safe was open and the letter whose importance Mannister had stressed was gone. And in cold fact the safe was open and the letter missing. In her dream the letter was in Jeremy’s drawer. With his own hands Jeremy had taken it out of that drawer. In her dream she had the key of the safe. In sober truth Jeremy had seen her lock it, hold the key in her shut palm, and go as she had come. It was unbelievably strange.
    His mind fastened on a detail. He had found the missing letter in his own locked drawer. The key was on his ring, and it hadn’t been out of his pocket all day. … Why, what a fool he was to boggle over that! Wasn’t the table Mannister’s property, and couldn’t he have a dozen duplicate keys if he wanted them? But Mannister had left the house just after four. He had seen Mannister out of the house before he left himself. There had been no time to open a safe and a drawer. Then how? Good Lord— how?
    There was no answer to that.
    He fell asleep quite suddenly and slept till morning. Just before he woke he dreamed that he was walking down a long black tunnel which rang and reverberated with passing trains. It was rather horrible, because he could not see anything at all. He groped along by a damp wall and heard the trains go by—first the roar of their approach, then clang, clank, clang, and the hot wind of their passing, but never a light or the glow of a furnace, not even one single spark to break the darkness. Sometimes he was drenched in a cloud of scalding steam, sometimes the wind blew dry and hot and with such clapping gusts as to come near to wrenching him from his hold. There was a sort of ledge along the wall that he was gripping. If he let go, he would be sucked down in the wake of the trains and crushed miserably under the red-hot grinding wheels.
    All of a sudden there was a light; and first it was just a speck, and then it grew and whirled towards him, and he saw that it was a lighted window—one single lighted window in a black flying train, and just as it came level with him, time stopped. The train didn’t stop, but time stood still, so that without any conscious interruption in the roar and rush Jeremy was able to look into the lighted carriage. He saw Gilbert Denny walking towards him. He looked just as he used to look when he was pleased to see you. There was the whimsical cock of the eyebrows, the old half smile. He leaned on the window and touched Jeremy on the shoulder. “That’s not a very safe place, Jerry,” he said; and with that time went on again, and the train was gone. In his dream Jeremy tried to run after it, and the noise, and the heat, and the blackness were like nothing he had ever known before. He woke choking, with the bed-clothes over his head and his pulses thumping like mad.
    He had a cold bath and dressed. The dream receded into its own dark place. Mrs Walker brought him sausages and bacon.
    â€œCooked to a turn, Master Jeremy, and the bacon sliced thin the way you like it, which I said to that there Podger at Podger’s Stores—‘Cut it thin,’ I says, ‘or I go elsewheres. Of course,’ I says, ‘if you ’aven’t got a steady ’and you ’aven’t, and there’s an end of it—and it isn’t always the drink, as I know from my sister Winnie’s ’usband that’s a life-long total abstainer and his ’and shakes something ’orrid and always did from a boy.’ And Podger he looks fit to bust ’imself, but he cuts it thin—and I hopes this horful row next door didn’t keep you awake, for I’m sure Walker and me never closed a h’eye.”
    â€œWas there a