Dorothy Eden (14 page)

William looked at her and gave a short laugh. “Darling Kate, your one-track mind astonishes me. Of all the incredible things you’ve told me tonight, that is the most fantastic. Now forget it. Take your pills and go to sleep. I’ll be in the next room.”

Kate sat up. “You will not. What will Mrs. Peebles say?”

“Mrs. Peebles has given me her blessing. She said something about not letting a cat in if it scrabbled. I won’t let anything in. Now lie down and go to sleep.”

“Oh, go away.”

But half an hour later, in a shamed voice, trying in vain to shake off her drugged, haunted half-sleep, she called to him.

“William!”

“Yes. What’s the matter?”

He was at the doorway, filling it with his bulk.

“You haven’t got any pyjamas,” she said irrelevantly.

“I don’t usually bring an overnight bag. What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?”

He stood beside her. She was hot and restless, and her head felt as if it were bursting. There had been so many confusing, terrifying things. She couldn’t rest. She couldn’t sleep. Nothing was real any more and she wanted to die.

“What’s the matter, Kate? Shall I leave the light on?”

She nodded. “I’m such a coward. I should have stayed this morning. I might have found out something.”

“Something that wouldn’t have been your business.”

“Oh, don’t be so good-mannered!” she said wildly. “The time is past for behaving politely. I should have gone up the stairs and demanded to see that old woman with her nonexistent granddaughters. I should have found out about that nightmare face. I should have frightened Mrs. Thompson until she confessed about Rosita, who
did
live in that room, I know. I should have insisted on Mrs. Dix”—she closed her eyes miserably—“or is Mrs. Dix meant to be a horrible example to me.”

“Just stop talking,” said William. “I’ll hold your hand. There. Now go to sleep.”

Strangely enough, she did. And woke in the morning, in a mood of cool, exhausted sanity, to see William sprawled awkwardly against her bed, his hand slipped from her grasp, his head buried in the blankets.

Dear William, she thought. But he shouldn’t have spent the night here. Mrs. Peebles, for all her flap last night, was not going to approve, and Mrs. Peebles, in a disapproving mood, was tiresome. She sulked, and got secretive about telephone messages. Besides, one hadn’t been as ill as that. Or had one?

It seemed one had, for when, after drinking the coffee which William had made with surprising efficiency, she tried to get up, her legs collapsed like a stuffed doll’s. She was furious with herself and then more furious with William when he announced he was going.

“And leaving me to die!” she cried indignantly.

“I have to shave,” he said mildly. “And go to the office and do one or two other things. Besides, I’ve got an infernal crick in my neck. You might give a thought to that.”

“I didn’t ask you to sit by my bed all night.”

“I didn’t intend to. I fell asleep.” He rubbed his neck ruefully. Then he swooped over her with his overpowering virility. “You’re not too fragile to be kissed, are you?”

His unshaven face scratched her. His hands beneath her shoulders lifted her, and jarred her sore wrist. She wanted to be angry, then, all at once, couldn’t be. For, for the first time, Mrs. Dix’s dead face vanished from before her eyes. In a curious and irresistible way life flowed back into her. She couldn’t think of anything else but the wonderful exhilarating fact that she was alive, alive…

“Well,” said William gruffly, “that was better.”

He came back some time later. He hadn’t yet been to the office, he said. As far as that was concerned, his secretary had been told he was suffering from acute fibrositis. But he had taken it on himself to call at the house in Bloomsbury, on the pretext that Kate had been worried about the jewellery she had not returned to Mr. Grundy. There he had seen not only the small, gauche maid, but the old lady herself.

“Because you’re a man!” Kate cried in disgust. “These horrid, conceited old women!”

“She was in an invalid’s chair,” William said. “She was very old, but quite harmless, as far as I could see. She said she’d chosen the pearl necklaces, and sent the rest of the stuff back to Mr. Grundy herself. She wanted to know if you’d been taken ill yesterday.”

“I was,” Kate said bleakly. “I told you. With cowardice.”

William ignored that. He went on, “There didn’t seem to be anyone else living in the house, but of course I couldn’t pry into every room. I had a glass of sherry—”

“Was it all right?”

“Sweet and nasty. Did you think it was drugged?”

“It could have been,” Kate muttered, the shadow of her strange fear touching her again.

“Well, it wasn’t. For me, anyway. But old ladies like me. I heard a lot of very dull family history, and finally came away. Then I called on Mr. Nicholas Grundy, and asked if he had any French clocks, Louis XIV, which was the only period I was interested in. But he hadn’t, which didn’t surprise me, in that rather scruffy shop.”

Kate began to giggle. “What an absurd detective you would make! What conclusions did you come to?”

“If anything, that Mr. Grundy knew his stuff too well to run such an obscure business. But then he may have a mind above money.”

“Not with those beady eyes!”

“That sounds like your famous intuition again,” William said sceptically. And you know what that gets you.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went to see Miss Squires. But she wasn’t there. The office was closed.”

“Then she’s down at her cottage. And all alone, poor thing. I must go and see her.”

“She’ll be up for the funeral. You can see her then.”

Kate winced. “Must I go—to the funeral?”

William took her hand in his. “I think so, darling. I want to come with you.”

“Oh, I understand. To see who’s there?”

“Ostensibly to support you.” He patted her hand briskly. “I also saw the police.”

“Oh—”

“The inquest is tomorrow. They’re not proposing to call you unless the coroner insists. They don’t think he will. It’s a straightforward case of death by misadventure. There were no fingerprints, nothing.”

“The door was unlatched.”

“Apparently Miss Squires says Mrs. Dix was sometimes a little careless about that. She would go out late to shop, and not always pull it properly shut behind her. The inference is, of course, her uncertain condition. She hit the brandy bottle rather heavily.”

Kate leaned back on her pillows. “So there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Nothing at all.”

She gazed bleakly at the ceiling. Then she picked up her sketching pad from the bed and flung it angrily on the floor.

“I’ve sketched Nicolas Grundy and the woman in Rosita’s room from memory, but I can’t do that face I saw at Mrs. Mossop’s. There’s nothing in my memory. Just a feeling. As if it had been projected into my mind. Can you understand?”

“An hallucination,” said William calmly, picking up the pad and looking at the sketches she had done. A little later he added, “But the Mossop granddaughters weren’t an hallucination. I saw their photographs. Smug creatures who’ll grow into stout matrons. Not like you.”

“No,” said Kate, nursing her wrist. “If I keep on like this I won’t have a chance to.”

It seemed a very long time, that morning two days later, since she had walked blithely into the small, poor-looking house in the outer suburbs of Rome to collect a little girl dressed in a white party frock. Who would have guessed the anticipated party would be a funeral? At least, this was one thing Francesca was spared. One hoped that somewhere she was innocently and happily pursuing childhood pleasures.

To shut out the forlorn scene in the churchyard, Kate conjured up a picture of Francesca, plump and stolid, splashing happily on the fringe of some blue Italian lake, or eating her way through a large plateful of ravioli in a good restaurant, or even being taken on a shopping expedition to buy a replacement for poor, shabby, lost Pepita.

Coming to the funeral was a gesture of respect for her late employer, but as far as solving any of the problems was concerned, it was a waste of time. For, strangely enough, not even Miss Squires was there. Nor anyone else whom Kate would have recognized. She looked in vain for Rosita, the grey-haired woman who now lived in Rosita’s room, even Johnnie Lambert, who might conceivably have been back in London.

Among the seven or eight people, all of whom looked like elderly relatives, either of Mrs. Dix or the late major, there was no familiar face.

Death by misadventure. The coroner had not hesitated to give his verdict. For what semblance of suspicion was there that Mrs. Dix might have met a more violent death?

If, by any long chance, the mystery surrounding Francesca had put Mrs. Dix in danger, Miss Squires would have mentioned it. But Miss Squires, surprisingly, was absent,

Kate listened, stony-faced, to the completion of the service, then slipped her hand into William’s arm and whispered, “Let’s go.”

William helped her into the car. It was her first day out and she was still a little shaky.

“Well,” he said. “End of story.”

“End of the chapter only.”

“Then I don’t know where the next instalment is coming from. Nothing could have been more conventional or innocent than that little gathering.”

“One doesn’t expect intrigue at a funeral.”

“No, but one does rather expect one’s fellow intriguers to pay their last respects. Even a gangster achieves that recognition.”

“I think we expected too much,” said Kate sensibly. “I had hoped Rosita, at least, might have been there. But she wasn’t. What do you have to do now?”

“Take you home and go to the office.”

“You couldn’t take the afternoon off, could you?”

William beamed at her. “Darling, that’s perfectly sweet of you, but—”

“I’m only using you.” Kate said, with her usual honesty. “I want to go down to Sussex to see Miss Squires.”

“In that case I’m much too busy. I’ve got an editorial hanging over me, and Saunders is away with ’flu. I really shouldn’t have taken time off to come out here.”

“Then I’ll have to go by train.”

William stopped the car and turned to her. His face was serious.

“Kate, you’ve got to drop this thing. As far as you’re concerned, it’s over, and I don’t want you ever to go near that office again. You’ve finished with your old women’s shopping and your poodle-minding. If you need a job I’ll find you one. Or you could marry me. But you’re not going back to that place any more.”

Kate’s chin went up.

“Or I could take a Green Line bus,” she reflected. “That would actually drop me nearer to the cottage.”

“Kate, look here! You’ve already had two peculiar accidents through inquisitiveness, and I don’t like it. If there’s anything wrong it’s nothing to do with us. So let’s drop it and carry on as we were.”

Kate’s forced calmness deserted her.

“How can anything ever be the same again?” she flared. “Every time I see a little girl in a white dress I’ll think of Francesca and how I let her down. All my life this will go on, and it’s no use your saying: ‘Nonsense, you’ll forget!’ because I won’t. I’ve got to find her, William. She may be ill. She may be dead. At the very least she may be unhappy and bewildered and frightened. If ever I’m to have peace of mind again I’ve got to find her.”

William looked at her for a long time.

“And so you propose looking for her in the depths of Sussex.”

“Not for her. For a clue.”

William shrugged fatalistically, and started the engine.

“All right, which road do we take?”

“The Kingston by-pass. Darling, you are sweet.”

“Save your honeyed words for Miss Squires.”

Kate snuggled against him. “What’s your editorial on?”

“The state of the roads.”

“How perfectly splendid. You can get some local colour this afternoon. So it needn’t be entirely wasted for you, after all.”

“My dearest angel,” said William, with detached vehemence, “in a very short time I am going to take to beating you.”

Beneath her facetiousness, Kate was very glad that William had come. This was her first day out since her accident, and she was ridiculously nervous. She didn’t think she could have gone anywhere alone, without all the time looking over her shoulder to see whether the Chinese-faced man had suddenly appeared, like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat. If she had travelled on a bus she would have seen him two seats behind her, or he would have been the ticket collector, and as for a train, it was inevitable that he would have been strolling up and down the corridor, never looking at her directly, but always conscious of her.

But he would not be likely to follow William, who was a fast driver, into the heart of Sussex. She relaxed, almost contentedly, and thought of the long talk she would have with Miss Squires in the privacy of her country cottage. With no eavesdropper, Miss Squires would tell her all she knew. For what point now was there in concealing anything?

At first it didn’t seem as if anyone were home. The cottage stood behind a high yew hedge which, when Kate had passed through the gate, concealed the car. She had refused to allow William to come with her, fearing that in front of him Miss Squires might refuse to talk. But now, as she stood on the doorstep, she was tempted to call to him. It was growing dark, and the trees and bushes rustled with the country wind. Also, it was strange that although no lights showed Kate had the uncanny, prickly feeling that someone was peeping at her through the blank windows.

She rang the bell again, then rapped.

At last a sound, oddly cautious, came from within. It was almost as if Miss Squires were tiptoeing to the door. Goodness, if she were as nervous as that she shouldn’t live alone in the country.

The door opened a little, then wider, as Miss Squires realized who her caller was.

“Kate!” she exclaimed.

“Hullo, can I come in? I want to talk to you.”

Miss Squires backed a step away down the dark hall. Oddly, even now, she had not put a light on. Kate realized that she was hugging her black-and-white cat, Tom, who struggled in her arms.