"And you're welcome." Mrs. Oates rose to get down fresh china from the Welsh dresser. "I see as how you know the tricks of the trade. You want a brown pot to draw the flavour from the leaves. I'll get out the drawing-room cake for you."
"Shop-cake? Not on your life. I want kitchen dough-cake. You don't know how all this appeals to me, Mrs. Oates. I was thinking of this, about an hour ago, in very different circumstances."
She looked around her with appreciative eyes. The kitchen was a huge room, with an uneven floor, and corners where shadows collected. There was no white enamel, no glass-fronted cabinet, no refrigerator; yet the shabby hearth-rug and broken basket-chairs looked homely and comfortable in the glow from the range.
"What an enormous cavern," said Helen. "It must make a lot of work for you and your husband."
"Oh, it don't worry Oates." Mrs. Oates' voice was bitter.
"All the more places for him to muck up, and me to clean up after him."
"It looks fine. All the same, Miss Warren would have a fit if she saw there were no shutters."
As she spoke, Helen glanced at the small windows, set high up in the walls. They were on a level with the garden, and through the mud-speckled glass, she could see a faint stir of darkness, as the bushes moved in the wind.
"It's only just turned dark," said Mrs. Oates. "They can wait till I've finished my tea."
"But don't you feel nervous, down here all by yourself?"
"D' you mean him?" Mrs. Oates' voice was scornful. "No, miss I've seen too many work-shy men to be scared of anything in trousers. If he tried any of his funny business on me, I'd soon sock him in the jaw."
"But there is a murderer," Helen reminded her.
"He's not likely to trouble us. It's like the Irish Sweep; someone wins it, but it's never you and never me."
They were consoling words and made Helen feel safe and comfortable as she crunched her toast. The grandfather clock ticked pleasantly and the ginger cat purred on the best patch of rug.
Suddenly she felt in the mood for a thrill.
"I wish you would tell me about the murders," she said.
Mrs. Oates stared at her in surprise.
"Why, they was in all the newspapers," she said. "Can't you read?"
"I naturally keep up with all the important things," Helen explained. "But I've never been interested in crime. Only, when it's a local murder, it seems slack to know nothing about it."
"That's right," agreed Mrs. Oates, as she relaxed to gossip. "Well, the first girl was murdered in town. She did a dancing-turn, with no clothes on, at one of the Halls, but she was out of a job. She was in a public, and had one over the eight. They seen her go out of the bar, just before time. When the rest come out, she was lying in the gutter, dead. Her face was as black as that bit of coal."
Helen shuddered.
"The second murder was committed in the town, too, wasn't it?" she asked.
"Yes. She was a housemaid, poor thing. It was her evening out, and when her master came out into the garden, to give the dog its run, he found her all doubled up, on the drive, choked, like the other. And no one heard a whisper, though it was quite close to the drawing-room windows. So she must have been took by surprise."
"I know," nodded Helen. "There were shrubs on the lawn, that looked like people. And suddenly, a shrub leaped on her."
Mrs. Oates stared at her, and then began to count on her fingers.
"Where was I? Let me see. One, two, three. Yes, the third was in a public-house, and it put everyone in a proper scare, because he'd come out into the country. The young lady in the bar had just popped into the kitchen, to swill a few glasses under the tap, and they found her there, two minutes after, choked with her own tea-cloth. There was people in the bar. But no one heard a sound. He must have crept in through the back-door, and jumped on her from behind."
Helen listed with a sense of unreality. She told herself that these things had never really happened. And yet they toned in too well with the damp darkness of the valley, where trees crept up to windows, until it was possible to imagine confused faces peering down into the kitchen. Suddenly she felt sated with secondary horrors.
"Don't tell my any more," she implored.
But Mrs. Oates was wound up to a finish.
"The last," she said, "was five miles from here, as the crow flies. A pure young girl, about your own age. She was a nursery governess in some big family, but she was home for her holiday and she was going to a dance. She was up in her bedroom, and drawing her beautiful party-frock over head, when he finished the job for her. Twisted the lovely satin frock all round her neck, as it ate right into her throat, and wrapped it all over her face, so that she never saw another mortal thing on earth. Looking at herself in the glass, she was, and that was her last sight, which shows these beauty competitions don't get you far."
Helen did her best to resist the surge of her imagination, by picking on the weak spots in the tale.
"If she was looking at herself in the glass, she'd see him too, and be warned. And if her dress was over her head how could she see herself? Besides her arms would protect her throat."
All the same, she could not help making a mental picture of the scene. Because her own possession were so few, perhaps, she had a keen sense of property, and always exercised a proprietary right over her room, even if someone else paid the rent.
She imagined that the murdered governess occupied a bedroom much like her own at the Summit—brightly-lit and well-furnished. It was cluttered with girlish treasures, symbolic of the cross-roads—childish relics and womanhood's trophies, of restaurant souvenirs. Hockey sticks jostled with futuristic, long-bodied dolls; photographs of school-groups stood beside the latest boy. Powder, vanishing-cream—and the distorted satin shape on the carpet.
"How did he get in?" Helen asked, desperately anxious to prove that this horror could not be true.
"Quite easy," Mrs. Oates told her. "He climbed up the front porch, just under her bedroom window."
"But how could he tell she would be there alone?"
"Ah, but he's a luny, and they know everything. He's after girls. Believe me, or believe me not, if there was a girl anywhere about, he'd smell her out."
Helen glanced apprehensively at the window. She could barely distinguish glistening twigs tossing amidst dim undergrowth.
"Have you locked the back door?" she asked.
"I locked it hours ago. I always do when Oates is away."
"Isn't he rather late getting back?"
"Nothing to make a song about." Mrs. Oates glanced at the clock, which told her its customary lie. "The rain will turn them steep lanes to glue, and the car's that old, Oates says he has to get out and carry it up the hills."
"Will he carry the new nurse too?"
Mrs. Oates, however, resented Helen's attempt to introduce a lighter note.
"I'm not worrying about her," she replied, with dignity. "I could trust Oates alone with the very highest in the land."
"I'm sure you could." Helen glanced again at the greyness outside the window. "Suppose we put the shutters up and make things look more cheerful?"
"What's the good of locking up?" grumbled Mrs. Oates, as she rose reluctantly. "If he's a mind to come in, he'll find a way. Still, it's got to be done." But Helen enjoyed the task of barring the windows. It gave her a sense of victory over the invading night. When the short red curtains were drawn over the panes, the kitchen presented the picture of a delightful domestic interior.
"There's another window in the scullery," remarked Mrs. Oates, opening a door at the far end of the kitchen.
On the other side loomed