What Dread Hand? by Christianna Brand

rain: wearing a long, belted macintosh and with an umbrella up. They wasted no time. He would leave the door open, and be sitting waiting at his desk, a few papers scattered there relating to Harold Hartley’s affairs just in case they should be disturbed. And she would slip in and go up to his room on the first floor and hand over the small envelope with the notes in it and wait, unaffronted, while he checked them. And he would hold out the large envelope containing the pictures, and allow her to select one—she did it steadily, not averting her eyes, though her cheeks would go first pale and then flush deeply—and tuck it into the big hand-bag she was careful to take with her; and so with hardly a word spoken, go her ways.
    And meanwhile at home she swept and cleaned and polished as though—as though, now that he was gone, she would sweep and clean and polish away every touch, almost every memory, of Harold Hartley’s past presence there. The only thing she did not polish—did not even touch—was the ugly, black revolver in the bedside drawer.
    But on the third occasion she took the revolver out of the drawer, handling it carefully, wrapping it in a silk scarf; and put it in the large handbag. And this time she took no money with her.
    She had thought it all out very carefully, reducing it to its simplest elements. Now she carried no open umbrella but clutched about her head and face a plastic ‘pixie-hood’; and she had hoicked up the long macintosh by its belt so that the skirt came hardly down to her knees, and scuttled along with a wibble-wobbling gait on her highest heels… In the hall of the offices she dropped off the macintosh, slipped over her head a large plastic bag in which she had cut a hole for her face and another for her (rubber-gloved) right hand. So attired and holding the revolver, she walked without flurry up the stairs to Mr. Bindell’s room.
    He went very white when he saw the gun; whiter still when he took in the significance of the plastic covering. He stammered: ‘For God’s sake…! Don’t shoot…! Take them, take the whole lot, I’ll never tell a soul, I swear it—’
    ‘Not even an anecdote in a pub?’ she said, quoting, ‘—when you’ve all had a drop too much.’ And she pointed the gun at the left side of his chest and, giving herself no time to think, pulled the trigger. It was stiffer than she’d expected and for a moment the whole thing seemed strong and alive in her hand; and there was more noise than she’d hoped—Harold had told her the gun was fitted with a silencer and she’d rather relied upon that. But at any rate, it did its work. At that range, it could hardly fail—and Mr. Bindell who had been unpleasant enough in life, was now most unpleasantly dead.
    She put down the revolver upon the desk, stripped off the rubber glove and the spattered plastic. A gun, its origins untraceable—fingerprints on it of a man unknown, who could never be known, for his fingers, prints and all, were to ashes returned and in her well-polished home, no trace of him remained. But a man’s fingerprints, that was the point: not a woman’s. And a common, household, rubber glove, worn over a glove—firstly to obviate fingerprints inside the rubber, secondly to allow for a size that a man might have worn. And a plastic bag, never touched by her own fingers… And nothing in the world—for Mr. Bindell himself had been the careful one, the secretive one—to connect herself with him: not, at any rate from the lethal point of view.
    She had brought with her a large envelope, addressed to herself at home, and ready stamped. Into this she put the envelope containing the photographs. In the hall she put on her macintosh again, belted it up very short and on her high-heeled shoes wibble-wobbled herself out of the side door again and into the rainy evening.
    She had marked a convenient pillar-box between her home and the office. She now returned to it and there posted the envelope; in a