Weekend with Death by Patricia Wentworth Page A

black-out lights.”
    â€œWickham is an extremely good driver,” said Wilson complacently. “You need not be in the least nervous, my dear.”
    â€œBut why are we going back?” said Sarah.
    â€œWhat makes you think we are going back, Miss Sarah?”
    She turned a puzzled face upon him.
    â€œWe are coming into Hedgeley again.”
    In the darkness she wondered whether Wilson was smiling. His voice sounded as if he were.
    â€œOne place looks exactly like another in the blackout, and I am sure you can trust Wickham not to lose his way.”
    Sarah said no more. She leaned back and stared out into the darkness. They were driving back, right through Hedgeley, between the garage and the hotel, past the church with the pointed spire. She could not see these things, but she knew that they were there. She knew that they drove right through the town and out at the other side.
    Presently they took a turning which brought them by an uphill road to open ground. There were no trees or hedgerows any more, only a black moor in the darkness under a freezing sky.

CHAPTER XIII
    About a quarter of an hour after Mr. Cattermole’s Vauxhall had driven away from his front door Henry Templar walked up the steps and rang the bell. It was an unconventional hour, and Henry had been bred to a regard for the social conventions. If Sarah had been in her own home, it would still have been a little marked, but since she was Mr. Cattermole’s employee, to walk in at half past nine in the morning and demand an interview was an uncomfortably conspicuous act, and one to which only a sense of extreme urgency could have compelled him.
    His conversation with Sarah on the telephone the previous evening had exasperated and alarmed him. He had not known her for seven years without being aware of the lengths to which her warm heart, her generosity, and her obstinacy were capable of taking her. If she thought getting involved with the police was going to throw her out of a job and interfere with her supporting Miss Tinkler, then she was liable to compromise herself to almost any extent in a pig-headed attempt to dodge the law. When you came down to brass tacks, the thing that made women so difficult to deal with was that fundamentally they had no respect for the law. He supposed it was because they had only recently had any voice in the law-making business, and before that for generations of women the man-made and man-wielded law was a thing to be borne, suffered under, dodged, flouted, or broken.
    During the watches of the night Henry considered very seriously the consequences which Sarah would be inviting if she persisted in withholding vital information from the police. He composed speeches and marshalled arguments, but he had extremely little hope that they would cause Sarah to see the error of her ways. In the whole time that he had known her he could not remember an occasion on which he had induced her to change her mind. Not when it had really mattered. And her answer when pressed had always amounted to this—“What’s the good of arguing, when that’s how I feel?”
    There it was—if you were a woman you didn’t reason; you felt. The irrational nature of the female sex really came home to him for the first time. Along with his serious consideration of the consequences which Sarah might be bringing upon herself, he began to be almost as deeply concerned about those in which he might himself be involved if he were to allow his feelings to precipitate him into matrimony. Because there was no disguising the fact that Sarah was a dangerously impulsive person. It was part of her charm. But—
    During those sleepless hours Sarah’s charm presented itself to Henry under the time-honoured guise of flowers decking the edge of a precipice. And Henry had no natural bent towards precipices.
    At 7.0 a.m. he dialled Mr. Cattermole’s number, and received no reply. At 7.15, at 7.30, and 7.45 he