Dorothy Eden (68 page)

“No, I suppose not. But I hate you going with them the way things are. I hate leaving you here.”

“Why, Dougal!”—she tried to be facetious, but her unsteady voice betrayed her—“You couldn’t be a little bit in love with me? Not with my hair this colour. You don’t like this colour. You have a thing about it.”

“In love with you!” he exclaimed despairingly. “How the devil can I be? With all that money!”

“Money!” she repeated. “You mean Aunt Laura’s legacy? But surely you have a false idea of the value of four thousand pounds. Or in New Zealand is it worth more—” She stopped suddenly, reading his anguished expression. “Dougal there’s more!” she whispered. “That’s what you thought I ought to know?”

He nodded.

“Then tell me quickly.”

“I should say there’s more,” he answered with the deepest gloom. “Only about four hundred thousand pounds more.”

S
IMON WAS ALONE IN
the hall when she went in. He had the lemon-coloured bird, Johnnie, on his finger, and he was cautiously lifting it to his lips and making soft kissing sounds. The bird, after regarding Simon intently with its pin-head bright eyes, suddenly rubbed its tiny hooked beak against Simon’s lips and whispered and twittered ecstatically.

At the sound of Antonia’s footsteps Simon turned his head carefully.

“Did you close the door?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“I’ve shut Ptolemy in the woodshed. Iris would be furious if she knew.” He rubbed his thick gentle finger down the bird’s sleek back. “I’ve got to have some time with Johnnie. He’s forgetting his vocabulary. He’s nervous, too.”

At that moment he heard Iris coming from the kitchen and he swiftly opened the cage door and slipped the bird inside. It wasn’t only Johnnie who was nervous, Antonia reflected. Simon himself was acting like a child stealing jam. He would have to stand up for his rights more than this if he were going to be happy with Iris. Would he ever dare to?

Iris glanced at them and went on.

Simon, watching her retreat, said in a low voice, “I say, Tonia, don’t hold it against Iris that she looked for those sleeping pills. She’d mean it for the best.”

But the missing sleeping pills and her disturbed room had shrunk into insignificance in view of what she had just heard.

“Oh, that,” said Antonia vaguely. “Oh, look! Miss Rich has forgotten her umbrella again.”

She pointed to it still standing in the hall stand. Simon gave an exclamation. Then he began fussing like an old woman, “Oh, dear! How unfortunate! It’s because it’s not raining, of course. She wouldn’t think of it.”

“She can’t want it very much,” Antonia said lightly. “If you ask me she isn’t quite right here.” She pointed to her head, smiling at Simon, thinking what an old woman he was in some ways, with his fussing over things. How would he act if it had been he to whom Aunt Laura had left all that money?

She went upstairs to have a bath and dress in her evening clothes. How could she be expected to concentrate on missing sleeping tablets or even that tremendous fortune when she had just discovered that Dougal Conroy was in love with her. How could she possibly be interested in sleeping tablets now when she never wanted to sleep a minute that she could be awake thinking of Dougal with his golden brows, his funny serious eyes, and his illuminating smile.

She wanted to ring Henrietta and say, “I’ve converted your son. I’ve converted him to red hair!”

But being an heiress was going to be an awful bother. Just fancy old Aunt Laura having all that money. One had always known Uncle Joe had been wealthy, but he had died twenty-five years ago and Aunt Laura could so easily have dissipated all his fortune in her eternal travelling. Apparently she had been extremely careful of it. Probably she had made good investments and added to it. Poor Aunt Laura, anchored at last, unwillingly, with withered flowers on her grave.

That queer scratching in the spilt powder on her dressing-table… It was growing dark. Antonia switched on the light to look at the writing again. But now it didn’t look like anything, just vague marks in pale pink dust. Had she imagined the letters? Probably, in her agitated state of mind, she had.

She got a duster and vigorously brushed away the powder. Tonight she and Dougal were going to find out something much more definite than faint hieroglyphics made with cosmetics. The thought of Gussie crossed her mind and suddenly she was shivering uncontrollably.

Dougal! she thought, desperately conjuring up his face in her mind, his gentle eyes, the slight entrancing roughness of his skin, his lips soft and yet hard on hers.

“You’re my star now,” she murmured. “Stay with me.” And the image of Gussie’s skinny terrified body being swallowed in the moonlit sea faded and she began to hum resolutely to herself as she brushed her hair and saw the amber lights starting in it.

They were all to dress for the dance before dinner, Iris had said. The next three hours were simply a space of time that had to be lived through before somehow she got back to the Hilltop and met Dougal and they made their search for whatever it was that Gussie had hidden.

(Gussie with seaweed in his hair and little fishes swimming about his unaware fingers.)

She stayed upstairs until the last possible minute, and when she went down everyone was waiting for dinner.

Joyce Halstead in a bright red velvet dress that made her look like a piece of plush furniture in an opera house cried, “Ah ha! I know now who the light in Antonia’s eye is for!”

“Oh!” said Simon heartily. “Who’s that?”

“Why, Dougal Conroy, of course. I caught them. Antonia, you don’t mind me telling?”

Iris handed Antonia a glass of sherry.

“Antonia!” she said delightedly. “Is Dougal in love with you?”

“I wouldn’t think so. He’s too wise. You see,” she said clearly, “he isn’t a fortune hunter.”

“Good gracious, have you a lot of money?” Joyce asked inquisitively.

“I didn’t know I had, but it seems I have. Or will have next month when I’m twenty-four. It’s a legacy from my aunt,” she explained to the Halsteads. “Nearly a half a million. It sounds an awful lot, doesn’t it. Quite frankly it terrifies me.”

“Gosh!” breathed Joyce.

“Antonia, you weren’t supposed to know that,” Simon said heavily.

“Is that what Dougal Conroy was talking to you about?” said Iris. “I don’t think that’s very ethical. Do you, Simon? In view of the instructions in the will.”

“You see,” Antonia said, still talking to the Halsteads, “my dear old Aunt Laura had a funny idea that if I didn’t know I was an heiress I would be protected from fortune hunters. But what she didn’t realise was that other people would have ways of finding out and that
I
would be the only person in the dark. Which is a little inconvenient and confusing.”

Ralph Bealey spoke for the first time.

“Aren’t you rather jumping to conclusions about people’s motives?” He was twisting his sherry glass in his long thin fingers. In her excited imagination his face seemed distorted, his nose too crooked, his eyes extraordinarily close-set, his mouth a straight flat scar.

“I wouldn’t think so,” she answered lightly. “Money’s a wonderful comfort to some people. Personally, I think it’s an awful nuisance. I long to be loved for myself alone.”

“Don’t be childish,” said Iris. “Whoever found money a nuisance? Simon, do for goodness’ sake fill people’s glasses. As a barman you’re hopeless.” She picked up the sherry bottle. Her little shoulders above her gold dress were white and smooth, small as a child’s, her hair woven in a rope round her head had its enchanting pussy willow silver. She looked made for caresses and gentleness until you saw her narrow white wary face and her eyes bright with intelligence.

It was easy to see that she didn’t care for the conversation. Simon didn’t care for it either. He swallowed his sherry in one gulp and his face seemed to grow red and hot all at once.

“I’ll speak to Conroy tomorrow,” Antonia heard him saying to Iris as he took the sherry bottle from her.

“Oh, if Antonia knows it’s too late,” Iris said lightly. “Anyway, she soon would have had to know. But it was to be such a marvellous birthday surprise. The way Simon and I have been keeping that secret!”

“And supposing,” said David Halstead in his serious considering way, “Antonia shouldn’t live to inherit the capital—”

“Supposing you can’t hang out another month,” Joyce finished gaily, “who gets all this wealth?”

But before anyone could answer that question there was a sudden commotion in the hall. Simon’s birds were twittering in an ecstasy of fear. The wires of the cage were thrumming. One bird’s voice was raised above the rest in a pitiful squawking.

Simon reached the door first, but everyone was in time to see the white cat streak across the hall with the little yellow bird in its mouth.

The wires of the cage had broken at one end and through the narrow aperture, as Johnnie sat preening himself on his perch, Ptolemy must have stolen a stealthy paw.

With a cry of anguish Simon gave chase.

Joyce Halstead, inevitably, was the first to speak.

“My, it’s the yellow one, too! Simon’s nuts about him, isn’t he?”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Iris said ruefully. She tried to twist the broken wires of the cage. The birds within flew about agitatedly, like scraps of pastel-coloured silk, opening their tiny parakeet beaks and twittering in their hoarse shrill voices. “Anyway,” she couldn’t help adding, with a note of pride in her voice, “Ptolemy’s a good cat. A good cat always gets its prey.”

As she spoke Simon came back into the hall. He had the yellow bird in his hand. It lay limply, its beak opening and shutting. Two of Simon’s fingers were bleeding where Ptolemy had scratched him.

“Simon, I’m sorry,” Iris said.

He held the bird out to her. His small blue eyes were full of angry despair.

“Look what your cat’s done! Look!”

Iris went to him. “Well, darling, I can’t help it. I can’t change a cat’s nature, can I? I’ve said I’m sorry and I really am. But after all it’s only one little bird. It’s not the end of the world.” She tucked her hand in his arm and gave him a little appealing hug. “For heaven’s sake, don’t be so sentimental.”

Simon gave her one bewildered accusing look. Then he shook her off, drew the bird close to his breast and without another word went upstairs.

Iris watched him out of sight. She flung out her hands.

“Isn’t he a great baby! Well, we’re not going to let that spoil our evening. Ralph, or David, do you think you could make the cage secure before there’s another tragedy? And then if Simon doesn’t come down we’ll start dinner without him.”

Simon didn’t come down to dinner. It was an uncomfortable meal with everyone trying to be normal. It was so easy to know what they were all thinking. This is an unlucky house. First a boy, a little brat, but a human being none the less, goes missing, and now Simon’s favourite bird dies. What will be next?

There was only one cheerful note about it, and that was that Bella’s face had its dim brightness again. Gussie still hadn’t appeared, it was true, and it seemed almost inevitable that he was drowned, but arrangements had at last been made for her sick husband to come up to the Hilltop. She was full of gratitude to Iris who, it appeared, had made strenuous efforts to get permission for him to leave the hospital at once.

Iris herself was reticent about it.

“He can’t live long, poor devil, and it means Bella has to nurse him. But if they can have this bit of time together it’s only right they should. One has to be human.”

Joyce and David Halstead nodded in sympathetic agreement, full of admiration for Iris’s thoughtfulness. Antonia would have been full of admiration, too, if she hadn’t known about the scrap of blue cotton caught on a bush halfway down the sheer drop of a cliff, and if she had been able to stop thinking about Simon grieving over the dying bird.

It was clear that Bella loved her husband a great deal more than she had loved her difficult son. Now, at least, she had one source of happiness. Even if, in some strange way, it were a bribe…

Simon came down with Iris when they were ready to leave for town. His eyes were puffy as if he had been crying. Iris held his arm affectionately.

“We’re all ready,” she said gaily. “Let’s have one more drink before we go. Some along, Simon. Drown your sorrows.”

“Is Johnnie dead?” Antonia asked Simon softly.

He looked at her with his swollen eyes. Then he said, “What do you think?” He began to laugh in a loud belligerent way. “Joyce will have the ornament for her hat after all. Isn’t that a joke? Eh? Isn’t that a joke!”

A
S SOON AS SHE
met him in the glimmer of moonlight at the gate Dougal said to her, “How did you get away?”

Antonia laughed. She had on a dress of some light material that gleamed in the dark and made her look not quite real, like thistledown or sea spray. She didn’t look as if she remotely had any connection with suspicious happenings, much less murder. He wanted to kiss her again, but he had himself well in hand now. Antonia Webb, with her ensnaring red hair, her courage and her forbidding fortune was not for him. He must find his quiet-voiced girl for whom he could toil happily all his life. Antonia must take her money and go away safely. She must be no more than a dream.

But he longed now to touch her. He had to clench his fingers in his palms.

“Oh, I got away very simply,” she said. “I told them my ankle was hurting—and so it was—and I wanted to put it up for a while. Iris came with me to the cloakroom, but she left me, thank goodness, and I just slipped out the back way and got a taxi.”

She had a flower in her hair, Dougal noticed. It was so incongruous that she should be here searching for evidence of a murder dressed like that with a flower in her hair.

“There were flowers everywhere,” she was saying. “They were beautiful. But I had the queer feeling all the time that everything was poisonous. I think they wanted me to go tonight to get a little drunk, then it would be so much easier to give me the sleeping tablets, the ones they’ve carefully hidden to make it look as if I’ve got them and mean to take them at the first opportunity. Last night was just a rehearsal—you know, I’m a little sorry for Joyce and David who are so obviously wanted as witnesses, genuine ones. They’re just the type, a little stupid, gullible, easily flattered. And Ralph Bealey’s so useful as a doctor on the scene.”