Читать книгу Eternity Ring - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 7

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There was a pause, yet it hardly appeared to be one, so charged was it with Miss Silver’s intelligent interest. When she observed, “A truly strange coincidence,” Frank Abbott laughed and said,

“Do you believe in coincidences to that extent? I’m afraid I don’t.”

Miss Silver continued to knit.

“I have known some strange ones.”

He laughed again.

“As strange as this?”

She made no direct answer, but said,

“Who is this missing woman? The landlady must have known a little more about her than that she wore a black coat and rather curious earrings.”

“Well, she doesn’t seem to know very much. I went down to see her, and this is what it amounts to. The missing woman hadn’t been with her very long—not more than a month. Name Mrs. Rogers. Christian name Louise. Slight foreign accent. She told Mrs. Hopper—that’s the landlady—that she was French, but had married an Englishman who was dead. She was nicely spoken, didn’t bring anyone home with her, and paid on the nail. She told Mrs. Hopper once that her family had been very rich, but they had lost everything in the war. Then she looked mysterious and said, ‘Perhaps I shall get some of it back—who knows? That is why I am in England. If a thing is stolen, the law can get it back. That is why I am here.’ She went out some time on Friday morning. Mrs. Hopper doesn’t know when, because she was out shopping for the week-end. Well, it was on Saturday evening that Mary Stokes says she saw a fair-haired corpse with one eternity earring in Dead Man’s Copse, and Louise Rogers has never gone back to Hampstead. I asked Mrs. Hopper whether she’d ever heard of Deeping, and she seemed to think that it was a patent food or a furniture polish.” He leaned forward and stretched his hands to the cheerful glow of Miss Silver’s fire. “Of course, you know, if it weren’t for Mary Stokes, one would simply conclude that Mrs. Rogers was week-ending and hadn’t bothered to let her landlady know.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“If she had intended to stay away she would have taken a suit-case. Is anything missing?”

“Mrs. Hopper says no.”

Miss Silver inclined her head.

“She would be well informed. A woman who lets lodgings keeps a very sharp eye upon that sort of thing. People have a way of removing their things by degrees and then going off without paying the rent.”

“Well, she says there isn’t anything missing. To use her own words, ‘She went off in what she stood up in, her good black coat and beret—very smart and quite the lady, though foreign.’ And the question is, did she go to Deeping and pose as Mary Stokes’ corpse, and if she did, where did she go from there?”

Miss Silver stopped knitting for a moment and said quite gravely,

“I do not think you can neglect the possibility that she has met with a violent death.”

“I suppose not. I’m to go to Deeping tomorrow and smell round. The locals won’t bless me, but it’s all fixed up with the Chief Constable. They’re sending me because I was there when Mary put on her act, and because I’m supposed to know the place. As a matter of fact, any knowledge I have is extremely sketchy. My uncle has only recently come back from a long stretch overseas. Monica got stuck out there too, so the only one I’ve seen much of in the last ten years is my cousin Cicely. I used to go down and take her out when she was at school. Monica wrote to the headmistress about it, and I got brevet rank as brother.”

“I think I saw your cousin’s marriage in the papers some months ago, to a Mr. Hathaway.”

“Yes. They’ve split, and she’s at home again. Nobody knows what happened. She was right on the top of the world for about three months, and then she walked in one day and said she’d come home and she never wanted to see Grant again. You know, she’s a bit of an heiress. My grandmother came into a packet from her father, who was one of our shipping peers, and she left the whole lot to Cicely.”

“My dear Frank!”

He laughed.

“Uncle Reg and I mingle our tears. She couldn’t do him out of Abbottsleigh, because that was Abbott property, but he’s got precious little to keep it up on. She quarrelled with him because he took his turn of service aboard instead of buying himself out of it. My father, of course, hadn’t been on speaking terms with her for years—she was furious about his marriage to my mother. Being the second son, she’d got it all mapped out that he was to marry money. And of course the pen went right through my name when I joined the police.”

Miss Silver pressed her lips together for a moment before saying,

“Did it not occur to her that she might have made it possible for you to continue your studies for the Bar as your father had intended?”

He looked at her with sardonic amusement.

“Oh, yes, it occurred to her all right. She had me down and told me just how thriftless and foolish my father had always been, and how entirely in keeping it was that he should die before he had provided me with a profession. I can see her now, sitting up as bleak as an east wind and telling me she didn’t propose to put a premium on folly and incompetence by taking over his responsibilities.”

“My dear Frank!”

His look softened momentarily.

“Blessing in disguise, I shouldn’t wonder. I should probably never have got a brief—to say nothing of not meeting you. Well, that was my last visit to Abbottsleigh till Uncle Reg came back the other day.” He laughed. “I told her what I thought of her in a few well chosen words and cleared out. You know, what’s so charming for me is that I’m her dead spit and image. I can even see it myself.”

“Is your cousin like her too?”

“Oh, no—Cis is a little brown thing.”

There was a pause. Then Miss Silver said,

“Just why have you been telling me all this, Frank?”

A gleam of humour came and went. He said casually,

“Oh, I don’t know—I do tell you things, don’t I?”

She looked at him with affectionate severity and produced a quotation from her favourite Lord Tennyson.

“‘And trust me not at all or all in all.’”

He laughed.

“And, ‘A lie that is half the truth is ever the biggest of lies,’ or words to that effect. All right, I’ll come clean. Monica is dying to meet you. How would you like to come down on a visit to Abbottsleigh?”

She maintained her gaze.

“Are you offering me a professional engagement?”

He laughed a little.

“Not at the moment.”

“What do you mean by that, Frank?”

His lip twisted.

“I don’t know what I mean. State of mind quite chaotic. The nearest I can get to it is that the thing as it stands makes nonsense, and you have a way of inducing things to make sense. All quite vague and filmy, and mixed up with the fact that Monica really is dying to meet you—” He broke off, and then said quite seriously, “I’d like you to see Mary Stokes and tell me whether she’s lying. Also to what extent. And why.”