Read Online Dead Water by Ngaio Marsh - Free Book Online

disappear. ‘Inrespect of my letter,’ Miss Emily said, with a direct look at the Major, ‘I would suggest that we postpone any discussion until I have made myself fully conversant with prevailing conditions on my property. I hope this arrangement is convenient?’
    ‘Anything!’ he cried. ‘Naturally. Anything! But I do hope –’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Miss Emily and left him.
    The footpath from the hotel to the Spring followed, at an even level, the contour of an intervening slope. It was wide and well-surfaced and, as she had read in one of the brochures, amply provided for the passage of a wheeled chair. She walked along it at a steady pace, looking down as she did so at Fisherman’s Bay, the cottages, the narrow strip of water and a not very distant prospect of the village. A mellow light lay across the hillside; there was a prevailing scent of sea and of bracken. A lark sang overhead. It was very much the same sort of afternoon as that upon which, two years ago, Wally Trehern had blundered up the hillside to the Spring. Over the course he had so blindly taken there was now a well-defined, tar-sealed, and tactfully graded route which converged with Miss Emily’s footpath at the entrance to the Spring.
    The Spring itself, its pool, its modest waterfall and the bouldered slope above it, were now enclosed by a high wire-netting fence. There were one or two rustic benches outside this barricade. Entrance was effected through a turnpike of tall netted flanges which could be operated by the insertion into a slot-machine of one of the discs with which Miss Emily was provided.
    She did not immediately make use of it. There were people at the Spring. An emaciated man whose tragic face had arrested Jenny Williams’s attention at the bus stop and a young woman with a baby. The man knelt by the fall and seemed only by an effort to sustain his thin hands against the pressure of the water. His head was downbent. He rose, and, without looking at them, walked by the mother and child to a one-way exit from the enclosure. As he passed Miss Emily his gaze met hers and his mouth hesitated in a smile. Miss Emily inclined her head and they said ‘Good evening’ simultaneously. ‘I have great hopes,’ the man said rather faintly. He lifted his hat and moved away downhill.
    The young woman, in her turn, had knelt by the fall. She had bared the head of her baby and held her cupped hand above it. Atrickle of water glittered briefly. Miss Emily sat down abruptly on a bench and shut her eyes.
    When she opened them again, the young woman with the baby was coming towards her.
    ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘Can I help you? Do you want to go in?’
    ‘I am not ill,’ Miss Emily said and added, ‘thank you, my dear.’
    ‘Oh, excuse me. I’m sorry. That’s all right, then.’
    ‘Your baby. Has your baby – ?’
    ‘Well, yes. It’s a sort of deficiency, the doctor says. He just doesn’t seem to thrive. But there’ve been such wonderful reports – you can’t get away from it, can you? So I’ve got great hopes.’
    She lingered on for a moment and then smiled and nodded and went away.
    ‘Great hopes!’ Miss Emily muttered. ‘Ah, Mon Dieu! Great hopes indeed.’
    She pulled herself together and extracted a nickel disc from her bag. There was a notice by the turnstile saying that arrangements could be made at the hotel for stretcher cases to be admitted. Miss Emily let herself in and inspected the terrain. The freshet gurgled in and out of its pool. The waterfall prattled. She looked towards the brow of the hill. The sun shone full in her eyes and dazzled them. She walked round to a ledge above the Spring and found a flat rock upon which she seated herself. Behind her was a bank, and, above that, the boulder and bracken where Wally’s green lady was generally supposed to have appeared. Miss Emily opened her umbrella and composed herself.
    She presented a curious figure, motionless, canopied and black and did indeed