The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James

needn’t necessarily be a secretarial school. Probably most modern comprehensives taught shorthand and typing; what was to prevent any member of the staff, whatever his or her subjects, from staying after school hours and making private use of the machines?
    And there was another way in which the messages could have been produced and one which she thought the most likely. She had bought cheap second-hand machines for her own Agency, visiting the shops and showrooms where they were chained on display and trying them out, moving unhindered and unregarded from machine to machine. Anyone armed with a pad of paper and the
Dictionary of Quotations
could have provided himself—or herself—with a sufficient supply to keep the menace going, making a series of short visits to a variety of shops in districts where he was unlikely to be recognized. A reference to the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory would show him where to find them.
    Before filing the messages in the folder she looked closely at the one which Sir George had told her had been typed onhis machine. Was it her imagination that the skull and crossbones had been drawn by a different, a more careful, less assured hand? Certainly the heads of the two crossing bones were differently shaped and slightly larger than in the other examples, the skull more broad. The differences were small, but she thought significant. The drawings of the other skulls and the coffin were practically identical. And the quotation itself, typed with erratic spacing of the letters, had no venom in its admonition:
    On pain of death let no man name death to me:
It is a word infinitely terrible.
    It wasn’t a quotation known to her and she couldn’t find it in the
Penguin Dictionary
. Webster, she thought, rather than Shakespeare; perhaps
The White Devil
or
The Devil’s Law-Case
. The punctuation looked accurate enough although she would have expected a comma after the first word “death.” Perhaps this quotation had been remembered, not looked up; certainly it had been typed by a different and less expert hand. And she thought she knew whose.
    The remaining quotations varied in the degree of their menace. Christopher Marlowe’s bleak despair—
    Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, must we ever be
    —could only doubtfully be described as a death threat although its stark contemporary nihilism might well be unwelcome to a nervous recipient. The only other Marlowe quotation, received six weeks earlier—
    Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually!
    —was direct enough but the threat had proved baseless: Clarissa had lived out more than her hour. But it seemed to Cordelia that, since these earlier messages, the quotations had increased in menace, had been selected to build up to some kind of climax from the sinister threat typed underneath a coffin:
    I wish you joy o’ the worm
    —to the brutally explicit lines from
King Henry VI:
    Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither.
    Seen together, the sonorous reiteration of death and hatred was oppressive, the silly childish drawings limned with menace. She began to understand what this carefully organized programme of intimidation might do to a sensitive and vulnerable woman, to any woman come to that, darkening the mornings, making terrible such ordinary events as the arrival of the post, a letter on the hall salver, a note pushed under the door. It was easy to advise the victim of a poison-pen to flush the messages down the lavatory like the rubbish they were. But in all societies there was an atavistic fear of the malevolent power of a secret adversary, working for evil, willing one to failure, perhaps to death. There was a horrible and rather frightening intelligence at work here, and it wasn’t pleasant to think that the person responsible might be one of that small group who would be with her on Courcy Island, that the eyes