Mediterranean Nights by Dennis Wheatley Read Free Book Online Page A

land-girl in the barn; but she came to heel all right when I told her that if a city chap like me didn’t have his bit of fun now and again, living on a farm would send him barmy. I’ve acted pretty decent by her, too, about that young Corporal from the camp who comes to buy our eggs. Most hubbies wouldn’t stop at poking fun at their wives if they found them looking all goofy over the teacups at such a likely lad. Anyhow she played up well enough when I broke it to her that her uncle was a gonner; and, as things are at the moment, it’s a comfort to think that I married a girl who can’t even put two and two together.
    â€˜Of course, it was only natural that she should show more concern for me than about him, seeing that I’ll always be the big thing in her life. I wouldn’t be if she wasn’t so dumb ever to have tumbled to it that I married her only for her bit of money; but she had no idea how near broke I was, and being a simple country girl she thought me no end of a catch. When I took her to Newmarket and introduced her to all the boys, I can see her again now, a bit shy but so excited—and how her big eyes opened at the sight of the champagne and oyster supper we knocked back after our good day.
    â€˜That cash her father had left her kept us going for quite a while—and the going was good while it lasted. If only I hadn’t had to welsh on account of that big double I took on the Lincoln! After that, there was nothing for it but to accept her Uncle Sid’s offer to come down and live at the farm. Him being a widower and Minnie having been brought up as a farm lass, it was a piece of cake for him to have her run the house. I don’t owe him nothing neither, seeing that his heart had gone groggy and I had to take all the worst chores off his shoulders.
    â€˜God, how I hate that farm! What with getting up on icymornings while it’s still dark, being out in all weathers, not a soul fit to talk to within miles, the whiskey being locked up in a cupboard as medicine, and looking after those blasted animals day in day out; it’s my idea of hell. No wonder that, come Christmas, I felt I couldn’t stick it a week longer. I wouldn’t have, neither, if the idea hadn’t come to me of doing the old man in.
    â€˜That was Boxing Day—after he’d shown us the new will he’d made leaving the farm to Minnie—and by then I knew it needed only a sudden shock to make his heart conk out. Now he’s had it, we’ll sell up; then heigh-ho for good old London. Pity I’m finished as a bookie, but I think I’ll start one of those amusement parlours—slot machines and all that—somewhere off the Edgware Road. Plenty of easy money to be made in one of them, and no risks attached.
    â€˜Cooking the old boy’s goose proved more of a conundrum than I’d thought. What a comfort now, though, to think how leery I was about not starting anything before I’d got the whole job worked out. I suppose it was his bad driving that gave me the idea of rigging a car smash.
    â€˜I puzzled over the snags to that—the chance that the shock might not kill him after all; and how, if I’d been seen in the car with him, I might have some very awkward moments explaining things afterwards. My real brain-wave was about his driving into market and collecting the farm wages from the Bank every Thursday. I saw how easy it would be for me to have him pick me up on the way back, one time when there was nobody about, then if the crash didn’t do the trick it would be thought that he had given a hiker a lift and the chap had coshed him in order to rob him of his money.
    â€˜Laying in wait for him down in the valley was a bit of a strain, in spite of the two doubles I had broken open the medicine cupboard to get down me before I started out. Still, I felt calm as a cucumber once the car came in sight and I was flagging him for a lift. I can