沉睡的谋杀案23
时间：2026-01-29 07:41:40
（单词翻译:单击）
Thirteen
WALTER FANE
I
Gwenda looked across the broad mahogany desk at Mr. Walter Fane.
She saw a rather tired-looking man of about fifty, with a gentle, nondes-
cript face. The sort of man, Gwenda thought, that you would find it a little
difficult to recollect if you had just met him casually … A man who, in
modern phrase, lacked personality. His voice, when he spoke, was slow
and careful and pleasant. Probably, Gwenda decided, a very sound law-
yer.
She stole a glance round the office—the office of the senior partner of
the firm. It suited Walter Fane, she decided. It was definitely old- fash-
ioned, the furniture was shabby, but was made of good solid Victorian ma-
terial. There were deed boxes piled up against the walls—boxes with re-
spectable County names on them. Sir John Vavasour-Trench. Lady Jessup.
Arthur ffoulkes, Esq. Deceased.
The big sash windows, the panes of which were rather dirty, looked into
a square backyard flanked by the solid walls of a seventeenth-century ad-
joining house. There was nothing smart or up to date anywhere, but there
was nothing sordid either. It was superficially an untidy office with its
piled- up boxes, and its littered desk, and its row of law books leaning
crookedly on a shelf—but it was actually the office of someone who knew
exactly where to lay his hand upon anything he wanted.
The scratching of Walter Fane’s pen ceased. He smiled his slow, pleasant
smile.
“I think that’s all quite clear, Mrs. Reed,” he said. “A very simple will.
When would you like to come in and sign it?”
Gwenda said whenever he liked. There was no particular hurry.
“We’ve got a house down here, you know,” she said. “Hillside.”
Walter Fane said, glancing down at his notes, “Yes, you gave me the ad-
dress….”
There was no change in the even tenor of his voice.
“It’s a very nice house,” said Gwenda. “We love it.”
“Indeed?” Walter Fane smiled. “Is it on the sea?”
“No,” said Gwenda. “I believe the name has been changed. It used to be
St. Catherine’s.”
Mr. Fane took off his pince-nez. He polished them with a silk handker-
chief, looking down at the desk.
“Oh yes,” he said. “On the Leahampton road?”
He looked up and Gwenda thought how different people who habitually
wear glasses look without them. His eyes, a very pale grey, seemed
strangely weak and unfocussed.
It makes his whole face look, thought Gwenda, as though he isn’t really
there.
Walter Fane put on the pince-nez again. He said in his precise lawyer’s
voice, “I think you said you did make a will on the occasion of your mar-
riage?”
“Yes. But I’d left things in it to various relatives in New Zealand who
have died since, so I thought it would be simpler really to make a new one
altogether—especially as we mean to live permanently in this country.”
Walter Fane nodded.
“Yes, quite a sound view to take. Well, I think this is all quite clear, Mrs.
Reed. Perhaps if you come in the day after tomorrow? Will eleven o’clock
suit you?”
“Yes, that will be quite all right.”
Gwenda rose to her feet and Walter Fane rose also.
Gwenda said, with exactly the little rush she had rehearsed beforehand,
“I—I asked specially for you, because I think—I mean I believe—that you
once knew my—my mother.”
“Indeed?” Walter Fane put a little additional social warmth into his
manner. “What was her name?”
“Halliday. Megan Halliday. I think—I’ve been told—that you were once
engaged to her?”
A clock on the wall ticked. One, two, one two, one two.
Gwenda suddenly felt her heart beating a little faster. What a very quiet
face Walter Fane had. You might see a house like that—a house with all
the blinds pulled down. That would mean a house with a dead body in it.
(What idiotic thoughts you do have, Gwenda!)
Walter Fane, his voice unchanged, unruffled, said, “No, I never knew
your mother, Mrs. Reed. But I was once engaged, for a short period, to
Helen Kennedy who afterwards married Major Halliday as his second
wife.”
“Oh, I see. How stupid of me. I’ve got it all wrong. It was Helen—my
stepmother. Of course it’s all long before I remember. I was only a child
when my father’s second marriage broke up. But I heard someone say that
you’d once been engaged to Mrs. Halliday in India — and I thought of
course it was my own mother—because of India, I mean … My father met
her in India.”
“Helen Kennedy came out to India to marry me,” said Walter Fane.
“Then she changed her mind. On the boat going home she met your
father.”
It was a plain unemotional statement of fact. Gwenda still had the im-
pression of a house with the blinds down.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Have I put my foot in it?”
Walter Fane smiled—his slow, pleasant smile. The blinds were up.
“It’s nineteen or twenty years ago, Mrs. Reed,” he said. “One’s youthful
troubles and follies don’t mean much after that space of time. So you are
Halliday’s baby daughter. You know, don’t you, that your father and Helen
actually lived here in Dillmouth for a while?”
“Oh yes,” said Gwenda, “that’s really why we came here. I didn’t remem-
ber it properly, of course, but when we had to decide where we’d live in
England, I came to Dillmouth first of all, to see what it was really like, and
I thought it was such an attractive place that I decided that we’d park
ourselves right here and nowhere else. And wasn’t it luck? We’ve actually
got the same house that my people lived in long ago.”
“I remember the house,” said Walter Fane. Again he gave that slow,
pleasant smile. “You may not remember me, Mrs. Reed, but I rather ima-
gine I used to give you piggybacks once.”
Gwenda laughed.
“Did you really? Then you’re quite an old friend, aren’t you? I can’t pre-
tend I remember you—but then I was only about two and a half or three, I
suppose … Were you back on leave from India or something like that?”
“No, I’d chucked India for good. I went out to try tea-planting—but the
life didn’t suit me. I was cut out to follow in my father’s footsteps and be a
prosy unadventurous country solicitor. I’d passed all my law exams
earlier, so I simply came back and went straight into the firm.” He paused
and said, “I’ve been here ever since.”
Again there was a pause and he repeated in a lower voice, “Yes—ever
since….”
But eighteen years, thought Gwenda, isn’t really such a long time as all
that….
Then, with a change of manner, he shook hands with her and said,
“Since we seem to be old friends, you really must bring your husband to
tea with my mother one day. I’ll get her to write to you. In the meanwhile,
eleven o’clock on Thursday?”
Gwenda went out of the office and down the stairs. There was a cobweb
in the angle of the stairway. In the middle of the web was a pale, rather
nondescript spider. It didn’t look, Gwenda thought, like a real spider. Not
the fat juicy kind of spider who caught flies and ate them. It was more like
a ghost of a spider. Rather like Walter Fane, in fact.
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