Читать книгу Blindfold - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 10

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Miles Clayton put two advertisements in the papers, and sat down to wait for possible answers.

Mrs. Agnes Smith, formerly of Laburnum Vale, Hampstead, believed to have married again, and Ada ——, formerly in service with the above, were requested to communicate with M. C. Box 150.

The advertisements came out on Tuesday. On Wednesday Gilmore took him to dine with his brother Freddy and his brother Freddy’s pretty new wife. Miles and the two Gilmores had been at school together. He found Mrs. Freddy an engaging child of nature with a rolling blue eye and an amazing collection of other people’s confidences. She retailed them with extreme candour and a wealth of sympathy. Miles liked her, but couldn’t help wondering how long it would be before she landed Freddy head over ears in a libel action.

They had a pleasant little dinner, perfectly cooked, and deftly served by two very decorative maids in scarlet. The table and chairs were of glass, semi-opaque and icy looking, with a concession to the climate in the shape of scarlet velvet cushions to the backless chairs. Floor, ceiling, and walls were a dull, lustreless black against which Mrs. Freddy’s lacquered gold hair and alabaster skin, her scarlet mouth and finger-nails, were all most flatteringly relieved. She looked like a poet’s dream of a poster, and talked like the gossip page of a Society paper. It was quite entertaining.

The prettier of the scarlet maids was filling his glass, when Mrs. Freddy, with both elbows on the table and a cigarette lightly diffusing smoke over an already sufficiently flavoured omelette, addressed him in a low pulsing voice as “Darling Miles.”

Flossie Palmer so nearly said “Coo!” that she turned hot and cold and her knees shook under her. With great self-control she kept her hand steady and filled the glass without spilling a drop.

“Darling Miles,” said Mrs. Freddy—“you’ve been too utterly exiled, but I thought everyone must have heard about Moldavia and the Grand Duke. He’s one of my very greatest friends, and he told me he had practically ruined himself buying her the Echnovinsky pearls. Fancy being able to feel you were going about with a man’s whole fortune round your neck! Too marvellous! Freddy, my sweet, won’t you ruin yourself—just to give me the thrill of feeling you cared enough to do it?”

Freddy, a cheerful thick-set young man with steady good-natured eyes, kissed his hand to her across the table.

“Nothing doing, darling.”

The blue eyes rolled mournfully.

“He hasn’t got any soul,” she said. She puffed at her cigarette and the ash fell into her plate. “If anyone does want to ruin themselves for me, let it be black pearls—that’s all I ask. Too marvellous on my skin, wouldn’t they be? A long rope, you know, hanging down over something very filmy—not quite white—something like what I’ve got on.”

“Miles is looking for a string of black pearls,” said the elder Gilmore with a sardonic gleam in his eye. “If he gets them, you can vamp him for them, or steal them and put up Freddy to take the blame. I daresay he’d go to prison for you at a pinch, Lila.”

The blue eyes rolled again.

“Would you, my sweet?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Freddy. “So you’d better not try it on, darling.”

Lila Gilmore turned her attention to Miles.

“You know, when Narina Littlecote sold her sister-in-law’s rubies, there was a most terrible fuss. Narina told me all about it afterwards. She said no one had any idea how unkind Victoria had been. She said if it had been her, she’d have been only too glad to think the wretched things were being some use instead of just lying in a safe. Because you know, my dear, really they were too archaic—an absolutely pre-Edwardian necklace, with great vulgar lumps of stones plastered on with diamonds. And to think of Victoria ever wearing it positively made one blush. Well, as Narina said, it really was doing her a kindness—and Victoria was downright disagreeable about it. Why are you looking for a string of black pearls? What are you going to do with them when you’ve found them? You know, if you haven’t got the right skin for pearls, they make you look too, too repellent.”

“I wasn’t thinking of wearing them myself,” said Miles, laughing.

“Darling Miles, you’d look sweet! Perhaps just a shade too bronzed, but I expect you had a quite too marvellous complexion when you were a baby. Tell me all about the pearls. Ian and Freddy can talk to each other. Is it a real string? Has it been stolen? Are you being Miles Clayton, the marvellous sleuth? Pearls are the hardest things to trace of all. Do you know how many there are in the string?”

As it happened, Miles did know. Both Marion Macintyre’s women friends had been able to tell him the number of pearls in that envied rope. He ignored the other questions and said,

“Three hundred.”

Lila drew an ecstatic breath.

“Casilda only has two hundred in hers! Three hundred would go at least twice round and hang right down! Wouldn’t I look marvellous in them? Darling Miles, if I were to be frightfully nice to you, would you give them to me?”

“I haven’t found them yet,” said Miles. “And as they were stolen twenty years ago, I don’t suppose I ever shall—and if I do, they won’t be mine.”

Lila sighed.

“And most likely some frightful old hag with a yellow neck is wearing them, and looking too foul for words.” She took another little puff at her cigarette and some more ash fell.

Freddy burst out laughing.

“Did you ever see anyone smoke like Lila?” he said. “You know, darling, I don’t know why you do it. You hate the taste, you make silly little puffs, and you cover everything with ash.”

Lila nodded mournfully.

“But Fitz gave me such a pet of a holder for Christmas—I’ve just got to use it, my sweet. Fitz would be most awfully hurt if I didn’t.”

They played bridge after dinner. Flossie Palmer, looking across at Miles as she helped the parlourmaid to set out drinks, thought him “ever so nice.” She was now quite certain that he was the Mr. Miles whom she had snuggled up to in the fog on the Embankment. It gave her a most romantic secret thrill to think she had leaned her head upon his shoulder. She’d pinched his arm too, good and hard. A shiver went over her. She let two glasses touch one another with a sharp ringing sound. The parlourmaid nudged her, and her colour rose.

Miles, suddenly aware of her gaze, thought what a pretty girl she was. She looked quickly away, her heart thumping. He was the only person in the whole world who knew just what had happened to her at No. 16 Varley Street. He was the only person she could talk to about it. And she must talk to him—oh, she must. Ever since she had heard about Ivy she had had the most awful sick feeling of fear. She didn’t believe that Billy had pushed Ivy into the river, and she didn’t believe that Ivy had thrown herself in. Ivy wasn’t the sort of girl to throw herself into a river, not if it was ever so. And she’d no reason either, because she and Billy had made it up, and the day fixed and all. No, Ivy had been pushed. And Billy couldn’t have pushed her, because he was over with his brother in Bermondsey, and lucky for him there were plenty to swear to it.

She shivered again. If she could talk to Mr. Miles, she might get it out of her head that Ivy had been pushed because she, Flossie, had gone to 16 Varley Street as Ivy Hodge and seen what she hadn’t been meant to see. Another glass clinked. She was glad to get out of the room.

“My! You were clumsy with those glasses!” said the parlourmaid. “What are you shivering for? Hot as hot, I call it. I don’t know how she stands it. But there—she doesn’t wear anything under those evening dresses of hers—not a stitch of any sort or kind, if you’ll believe me. It’s not what I call nice myself.”

The bridge was rather inconsequent, because Lila talked all the time. She had an artless way of looking over Freddy’s hand and commenting on what she saw there, and she was also very generous in imparting information about her own.

“Oh, my poor sweet—what a perfectly foul hand! Only two court cards! I do wish I could give you some of mine—I’m simply stiff with them! Now, if you had my ace and king of hearts—Ian darling, talking of hearts, have you heard the latest about Posh Winterbotham? He really has broken off with that Margarita woman at last, and she’s bringing an action for breach of promise against him. She must have the most positively iron nerve!”

It was during the fourth rubber that Fitz cropped up again, a drop in the incessant spray of Lila’s conversation.

“Fitz says——”

And then all of a sudden Ian Gilmore was asking rather abruptly, “What’s all this, Lila?”

Miles was dealing. He and Freddy had been talking, and then Freddy had cut to him and he had started to deal. He looked up from the cards when Ian spoke, and the thought went through his mind, “What’s up with Gil?”

Lila looked a little hurt.

“Darling Ian! Everybody’s talking about it! Fitz says it’s what he calls a hang-over from the Vulture affair!—Miles darling, you simply must listen, because if you’re aiming at being a sleuth, it’s all in your line and really too intriguing—Fitz says the Vulture was the most marvellous super-crook with irons in the fire all over the place, and when he was killed it was the most shattering blow, but the organization’s been pulling itself together again, and they think they’ve got a new head, and the American government and the French government——”

Ian Gilmore hacked his brother Freddy sharply on the left shinbone, whilst at the same moment he interrupted Lila.

“When you say the French government, which of them do you actually mean? They’ve had seven in the last two years.”

Freddy took his kick like a man. Without any change in his agreeable expression, he said,

“I say, are we playing bridge, or aren’t we? I don’t mind, but I should just like to know. I say, darling, I suppose you know that your nose is all shiny at the corners?”

Lila gave a low heart-felt cry of “Oh, Freddy—you beast!” tore open a gold vanity-case, gazed earnestly into a little round mirror, and began to apply first aid to the maligned feature.

Freddy proceeded to drive the insult home.

“I can’t see how you can expect not to go shiny when the room’s as hot as this—and you know you made me swear to tell you.”

Lila blew him a kiss with her lipstick. Having restored her nose, she was now reinforcing the scarlet of her mouth.

“Darling sweet, you haven’t any tact. Miles darling, when you do get married, you just remember this—all any girl wants is to be told she’s looking perfectly marvellous at least a dozen times a day. Freddy’s no good at it at all, and if I didn’t love him to distraction, I’d divorce him to-morrow. You know, that’s why the Poker Pocklington menage broke up. Sally said if she went on much longer with Poker looking at her as if she was his grandmother’s chest of drawers or any other old bit of Victorian furniture, and never noticing whether she’d got her hair on or off, or whether it was red, or black, or platinum—well, she might as well be a bit of furniture. So she took up flying——”

“Are we playing bridge?” said Freddy.

They finished the rubber, and the party broke up.

Ian Gilmore came down the stairs with Miles, but just short of the hall he said abruptly,

“There’s something I want to see Freddy about. I’ll say good-night.” After which he let Miles out and went upstairs again.