‘Yes, I found them,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘I put the box on my shelf.’
‘The thing is… It’s because of Dr. Fable,’ said Patsy, raising troubled blue eyes to Miss Hodge’s sharp grey elderly ones. ‘I mean, they’re—well, you know, sort of pep pills. I don’t think he really ought to have given them to me only I—I pleaded with him. I’m trying to fight it; I told him the tale a bit, he doesn’t know I’m not supposed to be on them.’ She insisted: ‘It would be so awful if through helping me he got any—well, any kind of horrid publicity. You know how ugly it can be and the press will be swarming around here soon.’
‘What can I do about it?’ said Miss Hodge.
‘If you just wouldn’t mention my having left them? Could you perhaps sort of whisk them out of sight before they start looking round your office? It’s for his sake. I do like him so much. And I think you do too?’ said Patsy, half tender, half teasing.
‘I’ll see that it’s all right,’ said Miss Hodge gruffly.
‘And not say a word to him? I swore to him I wouldn’t tell a soul, not even you.’
‘I’ll keep it to myself,’ said Miss Hodge.
A further examination, increasingly penetrating, produced nothing in the little man that might have been ‘taken internally’ along with the pink medicine. His finger-prints on the other hand were highly revealing. For Mr. Smith, the agreeable stranger of the Green Man, proved to be none other than Edgar Snaith, jewel thief, with a long and unbeautiful history behind him. He appeared to have arrived but recently in London, though a familiar face—and set of finger-prints—further up north. Usually worked with accomplices, varying them frequently. Certainly was not known ever to have associated with Dr. Fable, Miss Hodge, the pregnant lady—or Miss Comfort. Did prove, however, to have scraped acquaintance with the now deeply penitent Gladys (currently undernotice of dismissal) and had certainly elicited from her a great deal of information about Lady Blatchett’s ménage and regime. Witnesses attested to his having been seen at her front door on the previous evening; but agreed with Gladys’s indignant avowal that he had been (almost) immediately sent away; and both Gladys and Lady Blatchett herself could testify to the pearls having been in her ladyship’s possession long after he had gone. He had turned up at Dr. Fable’s two mornings earlier, declaring himself the victim of mysterious pains, his regular practitioner having been left behind when he came south. Had been a little insistent upon a second appointment being fixed for eleven o’clock this morning.
By this time it was not remarkable if the gregarious Miss Comfort, still caged up—though with all courtesy—at the police station, had fallen into chat with her fellow sufferers. The little man, however, proved resistant to her blandishments. ‘A fine mess of things you’ve made for me, Miss! The pain come on frightful and I took a swig of me stuff to ease it. What else do I carry it round for? And as for the picture—it’s my belief he’s got it upside-down, I was trying to see how it’d look if I righted it.’ Miss Comfort sh’sh’d him, to the great disappointment of everyone else present, and his voice died away to a reproachful grumble. Miss Comfort could be seen to be defending her actions. In fact she was saying, ‘It all went fine, Edgar. The Desiccated’s got them. You’ve drawn off the hunt most beautifully.’
‘When can you get hold of them?’
‘As soon as the police stop harassing you. And they soon must; there’s nothing to hold you on. Get in touch like we arranged and we can get on with it.’
‘No tricks meanwhile,’ said Edgar warningly.
‘Of course not,’ said Patsy warmly. And she meant it. He deserved his share thoroughly.
When some days later she judged that the time was ripe, she went back to Dr. Fable’s. Miss Hodge was in the act of shrugging on her outdoor coat. ‘The doctor’s left, I’m afraid.’
Patsy knew that. She had not come to see Dr. Fable.
Miss Hodge took off her coat again and led the way back into her office. ‘You’ve come for the pills?’
‘I’ve tried to hold out. But the craving—it’s terrible,’ said Patsy, going into her act. ‘I just simply must have them.’
‘No doubt,’ said Miss Hodge. She had turned and now half sat on the edge of her desk and she was looking very straight at Patsy. ‘You see, Miss Comfort—I know what the pills are.’
Patsy played for time. ‘Well, I explained to you—’
‘I mean I know that they’re not pills,’ said Miss Hodge.
‘Oh,’ said Patsy. It did seem rather final.
‘You see,’ said Miss Hodge, ‘you made one small mistake. Yes, I am in love with Dr. Fable; to any one of your age, no doubt that’s very amusing. But it does mean something: it means that Dr. Fable knows he can trust me—that I’d never ever let him down. He would never in his life have warned you not to tell me.’
So she’d looked in the box. But—having looked there, reflected Patsy, taking heart of grace, had done nothing; hadn’t gone at once to the police. Perhaps even the Miss Hodges of this world had their price? ‘Have you told this to anyone?’ she said.
‘No, I haven’t,’ said Miss Hodge; (perhaps the glass of sherry was paying dividends then?) ‘I thought… Well, you have shown yourself very—friendly—towards me, Miss Comfort. And I know Lady Blatchett, she’s a patient of ours—and I know she’s a horrid old woman. So I thought I’d wait and hear your side of the story.’
‘Let’s sit down and have a natter, Miss Hodge,’ said Patsy.
So they sat down side by side on the long upholstered seat beneath the upside-down picture where by arrangement with Miss Comfort Edgar Snaith had lately made a fool of himself. ‘You see,’ said Patsy, ‘Lady Blatchett is my aunt. And when my uncle died, she fiddled things—nothing illegal that anyone could get hold of: just worked on our doddering old family solicitor till she’d done us out of something like twenty thousand pounds. Well, that was too bad; but now my father’s dead and my mother’s ill—so beautiful, she is, Miss Hodge, and still quite young—and so dreadfully ill! And twenty thousand pounds—or ten thousand or five, for that matter—might make all the difference to her living a little longer and living that little in comfort. So… Well, one day our little house in Scotland was burgled and I caught the thief—no one more surprised than I was; unless it was him!—and locked him up in a room. And then, instead of sending for the police, I had a little chat with him. I mean, suddenly I saw that if I could bring in a professional, I might get some of my own back—and I do mean that, Miss Hodge,’ said Patsy, ‘get my own back. The pearls would be only a part of the value of what she’s robbed us of. So—we went into partnership. His name, no doubt you realise, was Edgar Snaith.’ And she went off into fits of giggles describing the alternative plans she and Edgar had devised, for drawing the fire of the police. ‘He’s safe enough. He’s never touched the pearls, they can’t pin anything on him for drinking pink medicine and looking at a picture. Unless, of course,’ she asked, raising her sweet blue eyes, half alarmed, half smiling, ‘you’re going to give us away?’
‘You mean,’ said Miss Hodge, ‘that I’m simply to hand over the pearls to you!’
Patsy half opened her mouth to propose a ‘cut’; but knew better and closed it again. ‘Would you—please?’ she said.
Miss Hodge got up and fetched the round white box with its green lettering. She sat nursing it in her hand. She suggested pleasantly: ‘Fifty-fifty?’
‘Fifty-fifty?’ said Patsy; incredulous.
‘Twenty-five percent each for you and Mr. Snaith. The other half to me.’
Patsy made a wild snatch at the box. It was empty. ‘I was waiting for that,’ said Miss Hodge. She added that Miss Comfort need not worry; the pearls were quite safe—but not where she would find them.
‘Fifty-fifty?’ said Patsy.
‘Make up your mind,’ said Miss Hodge.
Patsy’s quick little mind shifted: spotted a discrepancy, ‘Possession is nine points of the law,’ she said. ‘You have possession of the pearls. Why
divvy up? Why not scoop the lot?’
‘I am not an habitual criminal,’ said Miss Hodge simply. ‘I wouldn’t know how to dispose of them.’
‘Impasse,’ said Patsy.
‘Impasse,’ agreed Miss Hodge.
And yet, not quite. ‘Possession’s nine points of the law,’ said Patsy again. ‘But the law will not allow you to possess Lady Blatchett’s pearls. You do possess Lady Blatchett’s pearls. Suppose I cut my losses and inform the police?’
‘You do just that,’ said Miss Hodge, growing alarmingly less desiccated every minute. ‘And see where it will get you.’
‘It won’t get me anywhere: except one up over you. And if I can’t have my proper share of the pearls, that’ll do next best for me. Twenty-five per cent—of what a fence will give for them!—it’ll be worth that much to see you doing time. And don’t think you won’t. You can say what you like to them about me—I haven’t got them, I’m in the clear; they don’t even know that I know Edgar. But Edgar was at that old woman’s last night, and he was here the next morning. You wait till Edgar starts coming clean to the police: how you bribed him to deal with the sale of the pearls—which you’d already stolen on one of the old woman’s visits here, replacing them with false ones: perfectly easy while the doctor was examining the patient. You’d have told him to look for them behind the picture frame,’ said Patsy warming to her theme, ‘and to swallow them down with some medicine and so smuggle them out…’ She shrugged. ‘Lots of holes; but Edgar will stop all those up, never fear! He’s a past master, is Edgar, at conning the police. And there’ll still be nothing against him; he won’t ever have touched the pearls, he’ll tell them you have them, and that’ll be true. And against me also—nothing.’
‘Except, of course,’ said Miss Hodge, ‘that the most casual enquiry will reveal you as being the Niece from Scotland: with a grudge against Lady Blatchett and a well-founded conviction that what she possesses is rightfully yours.’
‘Oh, that!’ said Patsy. ‘No dice there, I’m afraid, love! You didn’t really fall for that, did you?’
‘Well, no,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘You cooked it all up on the spur of the moment from what poor Gladys had confided to your friend, Mr. Snaith. You thought such a story must surely win over my sentimental spinster heart, and I’d turn over the pearls to you.’
‘But you didn’t believe it?’
‘Lady Blatchett is an old woman,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘So odd for her to have a niece of your generation; especially as your poor dying mother is still so young—you are not the child of elderly parents.’ She smiled at Miss Comfort with the smile of a crocodile. ‘So much more likely, don’t you think, that the Niece from Scotland is by now at least a middle-aged woman.’
Miss Comfort saw the light immediately. ‘Like you?’ she said.
‘That’s right, my dear,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘Like me.’
The Niece from Scotland: obliged to earn her own living, wangling herself at last with her excellent references into a post where she might observe the old aunt at close quarters: might even ingratiate herself into her favour. The older one becomes, the more frequent one’s visits to the doctor—chosen because he dwelt so handily just across the way—and the more necessary the attentions of the doctor’s kindly receptionist. Miss Comfort bowed to necessity. ‘You are the Niece from Scotland?’
‘And you a professional thief,’ said Miss Hodge, ‘and that’s all about it.’ She rose, dusted down her charmless dress. ‘So I think fifty-fifty is a very fair division. Where do we begin?’ she said.
At Number 20, Lady Blatchett rang the bell for Gladys. She continued a serial lecture upon the sins and follies of careless talk in public. ‘But I have decided after all to retain you in my service.’
Gladys was not entirely astonished; not for nothing had she made herself indispensable over all these years. She said however, with due deference: ‘Thank you, my lady.’
‘I have had a nice cheque from the insurance people so I feel rather better.’
‘Oh, I am glad,’ said Gladys, much relieved. ‘Now your ladyship can have some pearls again.’ She said humbly, for in some mysterious way the theft was acknowledged to have been all her fault, ‘Always seeing you with them—I’ve missed them, my lady.’
‘I hadn’t intended…’ But Lady Blatchett looked into the mirror. ‘Perhaps I do need something.’
Bare, ancient, crêpey throat, where the dewlap hung unlovely and the ‘bracelets’ deepened with each succeeding year. ‘I was even thinking that your ladyship might have got a double row, this time. You’ll never match the last, I know; but perhaps two rows of something not quite so good—?’
Her ladyship thought on reflection that that might be a good idea. After all, a nice bit of jewellery was better for her, really, than all that money lying in the bank.
Better for Gladys too. What a blessing the burglary had been! Not that she hadn’t been, for simply ages, working towards something of the sort—all that carefully indiscreet talk in pubs! She’d been beginning to be a bit desperate by the time Mr. Smith turned up; the money from the first pearls wouldn’t last for ever—and if she died for it, her poor brother wasn’t going to be moved to some public institution where he wouldn’t have his proper privacy: a man of his background mixing with just ordinary patients…!
Behind the shop front of a respectable jeweller’s, Miss Hodge, Miss Comfort and Mr. Snaith stood aghast at an offer of twenty-five pounds for some nice cultured pearls; and up in her comfortable room, Lady Blatchett’s well-paid housekeeper was writing off to an address in Scotland…
PART FOUR
Petits Fours
Hic Jacet…
‘GOOD HEAVENS,’ SAID MRS. Fletcher-Store, ‘what a revolting jacket! Where on earth did you get it?’
‘I bought it off a man in the pub,’ said Mr. Fletcher-Store.
‘A man—what man?’
‘I don’t know—just a man.’
‘You really should be more careful what you buy off strangers in pubs,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store. ‘It’s awful. Looks like a dead sheep, turned inside out.’
‘Good lord!—just what he said his wife said.’ He looked down at the jacket doubtfully, flattening his chin against his chest. It was a brightish tan, true, but heavily fleece-lined and he’d fancied it had a—well—a bit of a Raffish look… And, lost in reverie, he saw himself, flailing his arms to shrug on the jacket as he ran across the tarmac to his waiting kite. ‘I thought it looked rather good,’ he said.
‘You thought it looked like the jolly old R.A.F.,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store, pronouncing it ‘raff’. ‘Wizard prang, old boy, and a couple of crates in the drink in my time, what, what: and if you don’t believe me—as well you may not!—a handle-bar moustache to prove it.’ She looked at her husband with something very much like loathing. ‘How I’ve lived all these years with such a miserable phoney…’
‘I was in the Raff,’ protested Mr. Fletcher-Store.
‘For six months. On the ground. And never saw a kite fly, except on Hampstead Heath. The ugly truth is, Gerald,’ she said viciously, ‘that you’re a phoney, a rotten, bombasting phoney, trying to cover up from all the world, yourself included and especially, that you’re nothing but a dud and a failure—never did a decent job in your life, never kept a woman in your life—except me, because I’m sorry for you; never even made a friend, except a few miserable pick-ups in pubs, bought with drinks you couldn’t afford. And now selling you jackets you can’t afford either…’
‘All right, all right,’ said Fletcher-Store. ‘I know.’
‘You know? You don’t know and you don’t want to know.’
‘I don’t suppose any man wants to know that sort of thing about himself. Especially if it’s true,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think it really does any good, quite so constantly reminding him of it.’
‘Then don’t go off spending money at that rotten little pub in Hartling and buying a lot of rubbishy tripe we can’t afford. You s
eem to forget that what money comes into this house is made by me. You with your shoddy little half-baked short stories—’
‘All right, all right,’ he said again. ‘Skip it. I’ve got the message. No more purchases in pubs.’ And he added, half to himself but loud enough for her to hear it, for it always galled her that in fact he was the better educated of the two: ‘Hic jacet.’…
‘Hick jacket?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was making a pun, dear,’ he said sweetly. ‘In Latin. It means you’ve slain me in the battle of the jacket. Hic jacet—here lies…’
But she got the last word as usual, after all. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘you were always good at that.’ He heard her footsteps pounding up the stairs, moving about the bedroom as she changed for her evening swim. After a little while the front door banged.
He waited five minutes to be sure she wouldn’t come back for anything, and then went out to the tool-shed where he kept hidden his bottle of whisky: she hardly ever let him go to the pub, so this was next best. Just the right tot, or one’s brain got fuddled and he had some hard thinking to do—filled up with a good deal of water to make it last longer. He carried it back to the sitting-room, pulled up a chair to the moonlit window, and sat down to go on thinking out his plan to murder her.
On the whole, Gerald had decided, the odds were in his favour. For a start there need be no hurry: the sooner the better, certainly, but there might yet come to be almost a pleasure in listening to increasingly frequent tirades, when each word added fuel to a funeral pyre already crackling. And then there could be no obvious motive. No ‘other woman’—one reason for coming to this ghastly hole had been, according to Elsa, to get away from the other-woman menace; and certainly here, candidates were nil. And no money interest: they could just about eke out on her scribblings and his own: living cheap on the fruit and vegetables and eggs he was supposed to provide by his work on the small-holding. (Small-holding! A vile old pig and a lot of scrawny hens, and all that manuring and digging—he, who in his day….) And he fell into a reverie again of those old wild, wonderful times of the ditched crates and the pranged kites and the boon companions boasting together over the exploits of others—never of one’s own, by George!—over the tankards in the jolly old hostelries….And after all, given the chance, might not he too have been of that splendid company? A man was not born to failure: surely it must be fair to say that it was bad luck that had made him one?
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