Not to be Taken by Anthony Berkeley Read Free Book Online Page A

that the ordinary person would expect. I write ‘the ordinary person’ because the ordinary person rarely peers below the surface of character; but it may be that a psychologist would have used the tortuosities of Cyril’s mind as a clue to the possibility that John was not altogether the simple soul he appeared. And in that case, as will be seen, the psychologist would not have been far wrong.
    Cyril is a businessman, engaged, I believe, in the import and export trade. He is in a prosperous way of business, has offices in the city of London, and lives in a big house in one of the wealthier suburbs. He is tall and thin and rather bald, and he wears pince-nez and that kind of striped trousers which denote a certain professional standing. He is a sharp man, is Cyril, and he knows it.
    It is queer on what little things enormous issues depend. If Angela, with a fecklessness that was really absurd ( I put it down as fecklessness, mark you, though Cyril had a different explanation) – if Angela had not omitted to notify Cyril at once of John’s death and invite him down for the funeral, quite possibly we should never have heard anything more about it, and Anneypenny would never have got into the headlines. As it was…
    The funeral was a very quiet one. Angela had spent the intervening three days in a state of collapse, in bed, pronouncing herself incapable of doing anything at all. All the necessary arrangements were made by Glen and myself. In a half-hearted way Angela seemed to want John’s body to be cremated. Both Glen and Rona agreed with her. Frances, however, opposed the idea. She has never told me why, but I know the reason. She was right, of course, from one point of view; but I can’t help feeling it a pity…
    Anyhow, the suggestion came to nothing. Angela, although protesting that this was what John had wanted, seemed unable to make her mind up; Glen seemed not to care either way; Rona was apathetic and did not press the point; Frances carried the day. Buried John was, therefore, in the ordinary way, in the little cemetery across the road from Anneypenny Church, and in the presence of no more than three or four of his wife’s relatives, of us his closest friends in the neighbourhood, and of a fair number of genuinely mourning villagers. His own side of the family was not represented at all.
    It was Frances who discovered that Cyril had never been told.
    Commenting after the ceremony was over on the absence of any relative of John’s, she asked if his brother, of whom we had heard vaguely once or twice, was not still alive. Angela answered that he was, but that John had never cared for him and had not seen him for years, and she let out that Cyril had not yet been informed of the death. Frances, who is strict about matters of that sort, was horrified and made Angela sit down and write to him there and then.
    The next day Cyril arrived, preceded by a wire which put Angela in a flutter of nerves and exasperation. She seemed genuinely not to understand why Cyril should be coming down at all; she did not want him; and she was plainly a little frightened of him. She actually came running down to our house herself instead of sending Mitzi to ask Frances if she would go up to Oswald’s Gable, and made Frances promise to help her through what she obviously expected to be an ordeal. Frances told her that she and I would dine at Oswald’s Gable that evening if she liked, and Angela almost kissed her with gratitude.
    And that is how Frances and I, having already been in at the beginning of the first stage, came to be present when the curtain went up for the second act.
    And go up the curtain did, in the most dramatic way.
    For as we were sitting rather awkwardly with Angela in the drawing-room, not knowing quite what to talk about over our cocktails and waiting for Cyril, who had arrived late and was still upstairs dressing, the parlour maid came in and spoke to Angela with an embarrassment not generally to be seen in so