The Rendezvous

by Daphne du Maurier

Genres: Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

An exhilarating and tense collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Rebecca.

"Mary Farren went into the gun room one morning about half-past eleven, took her husband's revolver and loaded it, then shot herself. The butler heard the sound of the gun from the pantry…"

The fourteen haunting stories in this collection span the whole of Daphne du Maurier's writing career and explore every human emotion: an apparently happily married woman commits suicide; a steamer in wartime is rescued by a mysterious sailing-ship; a dull husband breaks loose in a surprising fashion; a con woman plays her game once too often; and a famous novelist looks for romance, only to meet with bitter disappointment. Each meticulously observed tale shows du Maurier's mastery of the genre.

“Du Maurier is in a class by herself.” —The New York Times

Release date: January 1, 2005

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 288

Sample

Mary Farren went into the gun room one morning about half-past eleven, took her husband’s revolver and loaded it, then shot herself. The butler heard the sound of the gun from the pantry. He knew Sir John was out and would not be back until lunchtime, and no one had any business to be in the gun room at that hour of the day.

He went to investigate, and there he saw Lady Farren lying on the floor, in a pool of her own blood. She was dead. Aghast, he called the housekeeper, and after consultation they agreed he must first telephone the doctor, then the police, and lastly Sir John himself, who was at a board meeting. The butler told the doctor and the police, who arrived within a few minutes, what had happened; his message on the telephone had been the same to each. “Her ladyship has had an accident. She is lying in the gun room with a gunshot wound in her head. I fear she is dead.” The message summoning Sir John was worded differently. It just said, would Sir John please return home at once, as her ladyship had met with an accident. The doctor, therefore, had to break the news to the husband when he came.

It was a painful, wretched business. He had known John Farren for years; both he and Mary Farren were patients of his—a happier married couple did not exist—and they were both looking forward to the baby that was to be born to them in the spring. No difficulties were expected; Mary Farren was normal, healthy, and delighted at the prospect of being a mother.

The suicide, therefore, did not make sense. Because it was suicide. There was no doubt about it. Mary Farren had scribbled three words on a writing pad, which she had put on the desk in the gun room. The words were, “Forgive me, darling.” The gun had been put away unloaded, as always. Mary Farren had quite definitely taken out the gun, loaded it, then shot herself. The police corroborated that the wound had been self-inflicted. Mercifully, she must have died at once.

Sir John Farren was a broken man. In that half hour, talking to the doctors and the police, he aged about twenty years. “But why did she do it?” he kept asking in agony. “We were so happy. We loved each other; the baby was on its way. There was no motive, I tell you, absolutely no motive.”

Neither the police nor the doctor had an answer for him.

The usual formalities were gone through, the official business of an inquest, with the expected verdict, “Suicide, with no evidence to show the state of mind of the deceased.”

Sir John Farren talked to the doctor again and again, but neither of them could come to any conclusion.

“Yes, it is possible,” said the doctor, “women can become temporarily deranged at such a time, but you would have noticed signs of it, and so would I. You tell me she was perfectly normal the night before, perfectly normal at breakfast. So far as you know, there was nothing on her mind at all?”

“Absolutely nothing,” said Sir John. “We breakfasted together, as we always did; we made plans for the afternoon; after I returned from the board meeting I was going to take her for a drive. She was cheerful and completely happy.”

Lady Farren’s cheerfulness was also corroborated by the servants. The housemaid, who had gone to the bedroom at half-past ten, found her ladyship examining shawls that had come by the parcel post. Lady Farren, delighted with the work, had shown the shawls to her and had said she would keep both pink and blue, for boy or girl.

At eleven a traveling salesman had called from a firm that made garden furniture. Her ladyship had seen the man, chosen two large garden seats from his catalogue. The butler knew this, because Lady Farren had shown him the catalogue after the man had gone, when he had come to inquire if there were any orders for the chauffeur, and her ladyship had said, “No, I shan’t be going out until after lunch, when Sir John will be taking me for a drive.” The butler had gone from the room, leaving her ladyship drinking a glass of milk. He was the last person to see Lady Farren alive.

“It comes to this,” said Sir John. “Between that time, which was approximately twenty minutes past eleven, and eleven thirty, when she shot herself, Mary went off her head. It doesn’t make sense. There must have been something wrong. I’ve got to find out what it was. I shall never rest until I do.”

The doctor did his best to dissuade him, but it was no use. He himself was convinced that Mary Farren had succumbed to a sudden brainstorm, owing to her condition, and, not knowing what she was doing, had made an end of herself. Let it stay there. Let it rest. Only time would help John Farren to forget.

John Farren did not try to forget. He went to a private detective agency and interviewed a man called Black, recommended by the firm as trustworthy and discreet. Sir John told him the story. Black was a canny Scot. He didn’t talk much, but he listened. It was his private opinion that the doctor’s theory was right, and a sudden brainstorm, owing to pregnancy, was the motive for the suicide. However, he was thorough at his job, and he went down to the country and interviewed the household. He asked many questions that the police had not asked, chatted with the doctor, checked up on the mail that had come for Lady Farren during the past few weeks, inquired about telephone calls and encounters with personal friends; and still there was no answer he could give his client.

The one obvious solution that had come to his practiced mind—that Lady Farren was expecting a child by a lover—did not work. Check and double-check revealed no possibility of this. Husband and wife were devoted and had not been apart since their marriage three years previously. The servants all spoke of their great attachment for one another. There were no financial worries. Nor could the shrewd Black trace any infidelity on the part of Sir John. Servants, friends, neighbors, all spoke of his high integrity. Therefore, his wife had not shot herself through any fault of his that had come to light.

Temporarily Black was baffled. But not beaten. Once he took on a case, he liked to see it through to the end, and, hardened though he was, he felt sorry to see Sir John’s agony of mind.

“You know, sir,” he said, “in cases of this sort we often have to go back in a person’s life, rather further than the immediate past. I’ve been through every inch of your wife’s desk, with your permission, and searched her papers and all correspondence, and I have found nothing to give the faintest clue to the trouble on her mind—if there was trouble. You have told me that you met Lady Farren—Miss Marsh, as she was then—while on a visit to Switzerland. She was living with an invalid aunt, Miss Vera Marsh, who had brought her up, her parents being dead.”

“That is correct,” said Sir John.

“They lived in Sierre and also in Lausanne, and you met both the Misses Marsh at the house of a mutual friend in Sierre. You struck up a friendship with the younger Miss Marsh, and by the end of your holiday you had fallen in love with her and she with you, and you asked her to marry you.”

“Yes.”

“The elder Miss Marsh made no objection; in fact, she was delighted. It was arranged between you that you should make her an allowance to cover the expenses of a companion to take her niece’s place, and within a couple of months or so you were married at Lausanne.”

“Correct again.”

“There was no question of the aunt coming to live with you in England?”

“No,” said Sir John. “Mary wanted her to—she was much attached to her aunt—but the old lady refused. She had lived in Switzerland so long, she couldn’t face the English climate or the English food. Incidentally, we have been out twice to see her since we married.”

Black asked if Sir John had heard from his wife’s aunt since the tragedy. Yes. He had written, of course, at once, and she had seen the news in the papers too. She was horrified. She could give no reason why Mary should have taken her life. A happy letter, written a week before, full of her delight at the prospect of the future baby, had arrived in Sierre only a few days prior to the calamity. Miss Marsh had enclosed the letter for Sir John to read. And Sir John gave it to Black.

“I take it,” said Black, “that the two ladies, when you met them first three years ago, were living very quietly?”

“They had this small villa,” said Sir John, “and about twice a year they used to go down to Lausanne and take rooms in a pension. The old lady had some sort of trouble with her lungs, but not serious enough for a sanatorium or anything like that. Mary was a most devoted niece. It was one of the first things that drew me to her—her gentleness and sweet temper to the old lady, who, like many elderly people, semi-invalid, was apt to be fractious at times.”

“So your wife, the younger Miss Marsh, did not get about much? Not many friends her own age, and that sort of thing?”

“I suppose not. It did not seem to worry her. Hers was such a contented nature.”

“And this had been her life since she was quite small?”

“Yes. Miss Marsh was Mary’s only relative. She had adopted her when Mary’s parents died. Mary was a child at the time.”

“And how old was your wife when you married her?”

“Thirty-one.”

“No history of a previous engagement or a love affair?”

“Absolutely none. I used to tease Mary about it. She said she had never seen anyone to give her the slightest flutter. And her aunt agreed. I remember Miss Marsh saying to me when we became engaged, ‘It’s rare to find anyone so unspoiled as Mary. She’s got the prettiest face and is quite unaware of it, and the sweetest nature and doesn’t realize that either. You’re a very lucky man.’ And I was.”

Sir John sat staring at Black with such abject misery in his eyes that the tough Scot hardly liked to cross-question him further. “So it really was a love match on both sides?” he said. “You are quite certain there was no pull in your title and position? I mean, the aunt might have told her niece that here was a chance she mustn’t miss, another man like you might not come along. After all, ladies do think of these things.”

Sir John shook his head. “Miss Marsh might have had an eye to the main chance, I don’t know,” he said, “but certainly Mary had not. Right from the beginning it was I who sought out her, not the other way round. If Mary had been looking about for a husband, she would have shown signs of it when we first met. And you know what cats women can be. The friend at whose chalet I originally met the Marshes would have warned me that here was a girl, past thirty, in search of a husband. She said no such thing. She said, ‘I want you to meet a perfect darling of a girl whom we all adore and feel rather sorry for because she leads such a lonely life.’”

“Yet she didn’t appear lonely to you?”

“Not at all. She seemed perfectly content.”

Black handed back Miss Marsh’s letter to Sir John. “You still want me to go on with this enquiry?” he said. “You don’t think it would be simpler to decide, once and for all, that your doctor was right about Lady Farren, and she had some sort of a blackout which affected her mind and made her take her life?”

“No,” said Sir John. “I tell you, somewhere there is a clue to this tragedy, and I shan’t give up until I’ve found it. Or rather you find it for me. That’s why I’m employing you.”

Black rose from his chair. “Very well,” he said, “if that’s the way you feel about it, I’ll go right ahead with the case.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Sir John.

“I shall fly to Switzerland tomorrow.”

Black handed in his card at the Chalet Bon Repos at Sierre and was shown into a small salon that gave onto a balcony with a fine view across the Rhone valley.

A woman, Miss Marsh’s companion, he supposed, led him through the salon onto the balcony. Black had time to notice that the room was furnished neatly, with good taste, but nothing out of the way, very much the room of an elderly English spinster living abroad who did not fling her money around. There was a large picture of Lady Farren on the mantelpiece, taken recently, a duplicate of the one he had seen in Sir John’s study. And another on a writing bureau of Lady Farren aged about twenty, he judged. A pretty, shy-looking girl, her hair worn rather longer than in the more recent portrait.

Black went on to the balcony and introduced himself to the elderly lady seated there in a wheeled chair as a friend of Sir John Farren. Miss Marsh had white hair, blue eyes, and a firm mouth. From the way she spoke to her companion, who immediately left them together, Black decided she was hard on those who served her. She seemed, however, genuinely pleased to see Black, and at once asked after Sir John with much concern and wanted to know if any light at all had been thrown on the tragedy.

“I’m sorry to say, none,” answered Black. “In fact, I am here to ask you what you know about it. You knew Lady Farren better than any of us, even her husband. Sir John thinks you may have some ideas on the subject.”

Miss Marsh looked surprised. “But I wrote and told Sir John I was horrified and completely baffled,” she said. “I enclosed Mary’s last letter. Did he tell you?”

“Yes,” said Black, “I saw the letter. And you have others?”

“I kept all her letters,” said Miss Marsh. “She wrote to me regularly, every week, after she married. If Sir John wants me to send him the letters I shall be pleased to do so. There is not one letter that isn’t full of her affection for him, and her pride and delight in her new home. It was her one regret that I wouldn’t stir myself to go and visit her. But you see, I am such an invalid.”

“You look hearty enough,” thought Black, “but perhaps you just didn’t want to go.”

“I gather you and your niece were much attached?” he said.

“I was deeply fond of Mary, and I like to think she was equally fond of me,” was the swift reply. “Heaven knows I can be cantankerous at times, but Mary never seemed to mind. She was the sweetest-natured girl.”

“You were sorry to lose her?”

“Of course I was sorry. I missed her terribly, and still do. But naturally her happiness came first.”

“Sir John told me he made you an allowance to cover the cost of your present companion.”

“Yes. It was generous of him. Will it continue, do you know?”

The inflection in her voice was sharp. Black decided that his original idea of Miss Marsh as someone who did not wholly disregard money was probably sound.

“Sir John didn’t say. But I feel sure, if it was otherwise, you would have heard from him or from his lawyers,” said Black.

Black looked at Miss Marsh’s hands. They tapped the sides of the wheeled chair in a little nervous gesture. “There was nothing in your niece’s past that would account for her suicide?” he said.

She looked startled. “What on earth do you mean?”

“No previous engagement, or love affair gone wrong?”

“Good heavens, no.”

Curious. She seemed relieved at the wording of his question.

“Sir John was Mary’s only love. She led rather a solitary life with me, you know. Not many young people in the district. Even in Lausanne she never seemed to seek out people nearer her own age. It was not that she was particularly shy or reserved. Just self-contained.”

“What about school friends?”

“I taught her lessons myself when she was small. She had a few terms in Lausanne when she was older, but as a day girl; we lived in a pension close by. I seem to remember one or two girls coming in for tea. But no especial friend.”

“Have you any photographs of her at that age?”

“Yes. Several. I’ve got them all in an album somewhere. Would you care to see them?”

“I think I should. Sir John showed me several photographs, but I don’t think he had any that dated from before their marriage.”

Miss Marsh pointed to the bureau in the salon behind and told him to open the second drawer and bring back an album. He did so, and putting on spectacles she opened the album and he drew up his seat beside her. They went through the album at random. There were many snapshots, none of any particular interest. Lady Farren alone. Miss Marsh alone. Lady Farren and Miss Marsh in groups with other people. Snaps of the chalet. Snaps of Lausanne. Black turned the pages. No clue here.

“Is that the lot?” he said.

“I’m afraid it is,” said Miss Marsh. “She was such a pretty girl, wasn’t she? Those warm brown eyes. It is the most dreadful thing… Poor Sir John.”

“You haven’t any snaps of her when she was a child, I notice. These seem to start when she was around fifteen.”

There was a pause, and then Miss Marsh replied, “No… no, I don’t think I had a camera in those days.”

Black had a well-trained ear. It was an easy matter for him to detect a falsehood. Miss Marsh was lying about something. About what? “What a pity,” he said. “I always think it’s interesting to trace the child in the adult face. I’m a married man myself. My wife and I wouldn’t be without the first albums of our youngster for the world.”

“Yes, it was stupid of me, wasn’t it?” said Miss Marsh. She put the album down in front of her on the table.

“I expect you have the ordinary studio portraits?” said Black.

“No,” said Miss Marsh, “or if I once had, I must have lost them. In the move, you know. We didn’t come here until Mary was fifteen. We were in Lausanne before that.”

“And you adopted Mary when she was five, I think Sir John said?”

“Yes. She would have been about five.” Again the momentary hesitation, the inflection in her voice.

“Have you any photographs of Lady Farren’s parents?”

“No.”

“Yet her father was your only brother, I understand?”

“My only brother, yes.”

“What decided you to adopt Lady Farren as a child?”

“The mother was dead, and my brother did not know how to take care of her. She was a delicate child. We both of us felt it was the best solution.”

“Of course your brother made you an allowance for the child’s upkeep and education?”

“Naturally. I couldn’t have managed otherwise.” Then Miss Marsh made a mistake. But for this one mistake, Black might have let the whole thing go. “You ask the most extraordinarily remote questions, Mr. Black,” she said with a hard little laugh. “I don’t see that the allowance paid to me by Mary’s father can be of the slightest interest to you. What you want to know is why poor Mary killed herself, and so does her husband, and so do I.”

“Anything even remotely connected with Lady Farren’s past life is of interest to me,” said Black. “You see, Sir John has employed me for that very purpose. Perhaps it is time that I explained to you I am not a personal friend of his. I am a private detective.”

Miss Marsh turned gray. Her composure went. She became suddenly a very frightened old woman. “What have you come to find out?” she said.

“Everything,” said Black.

Now it was a favorite theory of the Scots, which he often expounded to the director of the agency for whom he worked, that there are very few people in this world who haven’t got something to hide. Time and time again he had seen men and women in the witness box, under cross-examination, and one and all were afraid; not of the questions put to them, which they must answer, and which might shed light on the particular case then under trial; but that in answering the questions they would, by some mishap, by some slip of the tongue, reveal a secret pertaining to themselves which would discredit them. Black was certain that Miss Marsh found herself in this position now. She might know nothing of Mary Farren’s suicide or of its cause. But Miss Marsh herself was guilty of something that she had long sought to hide.

“If Sir John has found out about the allowance and thinks I have been defrauding Mary all these years, he might have had the decency to tell me himself, and not employ a detective,” she said.

“Oh, ho, here we go,” thought Black. “Give the old lady enough rope and she’ll hang herself.”

“Sir John did not mention the word fraud,” he replied to Miss Marsh. “He merely thought the circumstances were rather strange.”

Black was taking a chance, but he felt the result might be worth it.

“Of course they were strange,” said Miss Marsh. “I tried to act for the best, and I believed I did. I can swear to you, Mr. Black, that I used very little money on myself, and that most of it went for Mary’s upkeep, according to the agreement with the child’s father. When Mary married, and as it happened married well, I did not think there was any harm in keeping the capital for myself. Sir John was rich, and Mary would not miss it.”

“I take it,” said Black, “that Lady Farren knew nothing of what was going on?”

“Nothing,” said Miss Marsh. “She was never interested in money matters, and she believed herself entirely dependent on me. You don’t think Sir John is going to prosecute me, Mr. Black? If he won a case against me, which he undoubtedly would, I should be destitute.”

Black stroked his chin and pretended to consider. “I don’t think Sir John intends anything of the sort, Miss Marsh,” he said. “But he would like to know the truth of what happened.”

Miss Marsh sank back in her wheeled chair. No longer stiff and upright, she looked a tired old lady. “Now that Mary is dead, it can’t hurt her, the truth coming out,” she said. “The fact is, Mr. Black, she wasn’t my niece at all. I was paid a large sum of money to look after her. The money should have gone to her on her majority, but I kept it myself. Mary’s father, with whom I signed the agreement, had died in the meantime. Living here in Switzerland, no one knew anything about the matter. It was so simple to keep it secret. I intended no harm.”

It was always the way, thought Black. Temptation came to a man or woman, and they succumbed to it. They never “intended” harm.

“I see,” he said. “Well, Miss Marsh, I don’t want to go into the details of what you did or how you spent the money intended for Lady Farren. What does interest me is this. If she wasn’t your niece, who was she?”

“She was the only daughter of a Mr. Henry Warner. That is all I ever knew. He never told me his address, or where he lived. All I knew was the address of his bankers, the branch in London; four checks were paid to me from that address. After I took Mary in my care, Mr. Warner went to Canada and died there five years later. The bank informed me of this, and as I never heard from them again I believed myself safe to do—what I did—with her money.”

Black noted the name Henry Warner, and Miss Marsh gave him the address of the bank.

“Mr. Warner was not a personal friend of yours?” he asked.

“Oh no. I only met him twice. The first time was when I answered his advertisement to a box number for someone to take charge, indefinitely, of a delicate girl. I was very poor at the time and had just lost a post as governess to an English family returning to England. I did not want to take a position in a school, and this advertisement came as a godsend, especially as the sum to be paid for the child’s upkeep, which the father intended to accumulate, was so generous. I knew I should be able to live as I had, frankly, never lived before. You can hardly blame me.” Something of her former confidence was returning. She looked sharply at Black.

“I am not blaming you,” he said. “Tell me more about Henry Warner.”

“There is little to tell,” she said. “He asked very few questions about myself or my background. The only point he made clear was that he wanted Mary to remain with me for good; he had no intention of having her back with him again, or corresponding with her. He planned to go to Canada, he told me, and cut himself off from all former connections. I was entirely free to bring up his daughter as I thought fit. In other words, he washed his hands of her.”

“A callous sort of customer?” suggested Black.

“Not exactly callous,” replied Miss Marsh. “He looked anxious and careworn, as though the responsibility of looking after the child had been too much for him. His wife apparently was dead. Then I inquired in what way his daughter was delicate, because I knew little of nursing and did not particularly relish an ailing child. He explained to me that she was not physically delicate, but that she had witnessed a terrible train accident a few months previously, and the shock of this had caused her to lose her memory. She was perfectly normal otherwise, perfectly sane. But she remembered nothing previous to the shock. She did n. . .