Read Online Eternity Ring by Patricia Wentworth - Free Book Online Page A

like. And there was only the one, because he turned her over and looked and the other one was gone, and he went on looking for it, running his fingers through her hair.”
    She shuddered uncontrollably. “I tell you it turned me up! I keep coming awake in the night and seeing it!”
    For the moment the careful refinement was all gone. It was a scared country girl remembering something which had sent her screaming and running to beat on Miss Alvina’s door. She took a sobbing breath and said,
    “If he’d caught me spying on him, I’d have been the next. The first minute he went back into the wood I ran for my life.”
    Miss Silver gave her slight habitual cough.
    “A truly terrifying experience. It is not surprising that you should find it painful to recall. But you will, I am sure, do all you can to assist Sergeant Abbott. The man who is capable of such a crime should not be at large. He may commit others. Now I wonder—you say that the stones in the earring caught the light as the beam of the torch went to and fro?”
    Mary stared, on her guard against a new questioner. She said,
    “Yes.”
    “Then you will have noticed whether the blood on the hair was wet.”
    “I didn’t.”
    Frank Abbott said,
    “Just try and think. It’s important.”
    She shook her head.
    “I wasn’t thinking of whether anything was wet or dry—I was thinking that she’d been murdered and as likely as not it was going to be my turn next.”
    chapter 8
    They got no more from her.
    As they drove back from the farm, Miss Silver observed the scenery with interest. Undulating common land to the right and fields to the left under a cloudy sky. The air less cold than it had been for some days past—oh, yes, decidedly less cold, and with a touch of damp in it. It occurred to her that the afternoon was likely to bring rain.
    Frank Abbott stopped the car where the trees began on the left-hand side of the road.
    “That’s where she says she went into the wood. Impossible to say whether she did or not. You see there’s no ditch to speak of, and it’s all as dry as a bone—it gets the wind across those fields.”
    Miss Silver alighted from the car and stood there looking at the scene. The wood was quite unfenced and the undergrowth very moderate. Mary Stokes’ account of her actions was a perfectly credible one. She could have crossed into the wood and walked down its edge very nearly as easily as she could have walked down the path. Frank walked down it now, looking about him as he went.
    When he returned, to find Miss Silver as he had left her, he could only say,
    “Well, she could have done it.”
    She said in a thoughtful voice, “Oh, yes.” And then, “I should like to get the geography a little clearer. There is, for instance, a track here between the field and the edge of the wood. Where does it lead to?”
    He looked at her sharply.
    “It comes out in what is called the Lane, which runs up from the village past the back of Abbottsleigh and the Grange—that’s Mark Harlow’s place.”
    “The Lane runs between those two estates and this wood?”
    “It runs between Abbottsleigh and the wood. Uncle Reg’s land stops where we’re standing now. The fields on our left are Harlow property, and the Grange is back there behind them.”
    “On the other side of the Lane?”
    “On the other side of the Lane. Deepside, Hathaway’s place, is farther along still, but the driving-road to Tomlin’s Farm cuts between Deepside and the Grange.”
    “Does the Lane go on?”
    “Yes, it goes all the way to Lenton. It’s the old direct way. The new road wasn’t at all popular when it was made, because it took a bit off the frontage of all those three properties. I believe my great-grandfather cursed the place down. He had to rebuild his lodge.”
    Miss Silver was looking thoughtful.
    “Dead Man’s Copse, then, is an irregular rectangle bounded by this field track, the track over which we have driven, the village street, and the Lane at