What Dread Hand? by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

selected from the envelope a single item—a photograph on glossy art paper. He allowed Louisa one brief sight of it and then returned it to its envelope. ‘A collection of pornography,’ he said; and added: ‘The most lurid I’ve ever seen.’
    Louisa thought, from her one glimpse, that this could hardly but be so. ‘Harold had this filth?’
    ‘In the private drawer of his safe at the office. Of course when I saw what it was, I concealed it from his staff.’ He snapped an elastic band round the envelope. ‘No wonder he didn’t want it found.’
    ‘No wonder,’ agreed Louisa, and thought of the gossip, spreading out and out in widening circles of ever more unsavoury scandal: nasty, dirty, salacious scandal, touched with that odd malice that, in so many quarters, Harold had seemed to attract. ‘Well, thank goodness, Mr. Bindell, that it was you who found it. And thank you very much for bringing it to me.’ Privately she thought that he might just as well have thrown the whole lot on the fire and not disturbed her in her widowhood; but he wanted thanks and appreciation, no doubt.
    Mr. Bindell however wanted more than that and made very little bones about it. ‘Money is tight these days, Mrs. Hartley. My wife likes to keep up a—a good establishment; and we have two children yet to educate. I know Hartley left you pretty well off, and you’ve only the one girl.’
    She sat with her hands in her lap, very still. She had been right, then, about there being a blackmailer. Only—Mr. Bindell! Mr. Bindell, the upright, respectable solicitor; and Mrs. Bindell, giving herself such airs…! She said at last: ‘How can you prove positively that they’re his? They might be anyone’s: you might even have—have got them for this very purpose.’
    No fool, after all, Mrs. Hartley! Mr. Bindell reflected that these simple people had often very direct and rational minds. But he had been ready for it, anyway. ‘You saw what a glossy print it was? He would—no doubt pore over the stuff: gloating over it, you know. The whole lot will be covered with his fingerprints.’
    ‘I see,’ said Louisa. ‘So—?’
    ‘One word from me in my position—one whisper going the rounds at a Rotary luncheon, one anecdote confided in a pub when we’ve all had a drop too much… Not nice for a young daughter, Mrs. Hartley, growing up in a small town like this.’
    ‘No,’ said Louisa, very white. She wasted no more words. ‘How much?’
    ‘There are sixteen of them. Say a thousand pounds each. And you buy them outright: no hang-over. But one by one,’ said Mr. Bindell. ‘One by one. I can’t have you selling out sixteen thousand pounds’ worth of stock and being unable to account, frankly and openly, for the reason. And who knows?—in time values in the pornographic market may rise.’
    She did not haggle: she acquiesced at once. He might have been alerted by that, but he was not; he knew her simple soul and that in it there was room for nothing but her precious Linda. And over the next year or two, she could find the money easily enough: it wasn’t worth her putting up a fight. ‘Next Monday evening, then, at my office? Half past six, by the side door—I’ll leave it ajar—after the staff have gone home. I often stay on and work late.’
    ‘I’ll come if it’s raining,’ she said. ‘If it isn’t, I’ll come the first evening after that, that it does.’
    ‘Raining?’
    ‘I’d better not be seen, Mr. Bindell, making regular visits to your office out of hours. And there’s no disguise like an umbrella, is there?’
    Shrewd, very shrewd: and quick off the mark with it too. ‘But unnecessary,’ he said. ‘It’s all offices round there, there’s never a soul about in the evenings.’
    ‘There’ll be even fewer about,’ she said, ‘if it’s wet.’
    And on Monday it was wet; and she took him a thousand and four weeks later another thousand—hurrying through the deserted streets, head down against the driving