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CHAPTER FOUR

At 3:30 p.m. that Friday Miss Frayle had kept an appointment with her dentist at the Wigmore Street end of Harley Street. It was a matter of a wisdom tooth which she had been putting off for several weeks; and then it had begun to give her rather more intense pain, and she had forced herself to do something about it.

Tomorrow, Saturday, evening she was accompanying Dr. Morelle on a weekend visit he was making to a friend in Kent, and the last thing she wanted was to have any trouble with the tooth while she was away from London; she had no difficulty at all in picturing Dr. Morelle’s impatience with her if that happened.

This was something she had not failed to point out when she had explained to him why she had to interrupt her work for an hour that afternoon, and he had grumbled that he was in the middle of a batch of notes he wanted to dictate to her.

Miss Frayle had indicated the tape-recorder in the corner of his study and left him to it.

She was terrified at the prospect of visiting the dentist, and made no bones about telling him repeatedly from the moment she took her place in his chair. He smiled at her reassuringly and then began explaining that she would need rather more than a local anaesthetic.

‘Just an intravenous injection,’ he said.

‘You mean, I’ll be unconscious?’ she gulped, the palms of her hands wet with perspiration as she gripped the smooth arms of the chair.

‘You won’t feel a thing,’ he nodded.

Terror flooded her; but almost without her realizing it a white-coated figure had appeared at her side; he was Dr. Someone-or-other, the dentist was murmuring, who as it happened had arrived a little earlier than expected to give a pentathol injection to a patient whose appointment followed Miss Frayle’s.

Miss Frayle fixed him with a sickly smile as the man said: ‘Lucky I was here.’

She remembered reading only that morning a newspaper report of some old woman dying in a dentist’s chair; and then she nearly fainted dead away, as she caught the glint of a hypodermic. Everything was happening so swiftly, so slickly, if only she possessed the courage to make a dash for it. Then she had a mental picture of the mirthless amusement on Dr. Morelle’s sardonic features as he listened to her if she had to tell him what had transpired.

Somehow the picture of him in her mind gave her a kind of desperate courage.

The cool-looking brunette nurse was smiling at her soothingly as her arm was bared, and the anaesthetist was bending over her. She closed her eyes. ‘Start counting,’ a voice was saying. She opened her eyes, she hadn’t felt the hypodermic, but she began counting.

‘One…two…three.…’

Now she couldn’t have kept her overweight eyelids open for a million pounds.

It was somewhere about five-thirty that she had found herself and Dr. Morelle in a first-class compartment of a Southern electric train snaking through the darkness of the winter’s evening, and she tried to puzzle out why they were travelling down to Kent by train, when she had understood earlier that Dr. Morelle would be using the Duesenberg. She leaned forward to speak to Dr. Morelle, wreathed in smoke from his Le Sphinx, but he was too immersed in his book for her to risk interrupting him, and she snuggled back in her corner.

‘We are travelling by train, instead of by car, because our arrival will be less conspicuous.’

For a moment Miss Frayle didn’t grasp that Dr. Morelle was speaking to her. His attention seemed to be concentrated on the page before him, and he did not look up. Then her eyes widened as she realized that he had read her thoughts.

‘Oh,’ was all she had been able to think of to say. She frowned to herself. Why should their arrival have to be so secret? ‘I thought we were just paying a weekend visit—’

He interrupted her, still without looking up from his book. ‘The object of our journey is to meet Tod Hafferty.’

The name had rung a bell. Wasn’t he some actor or something? Miss Frayle dug into her memory. Yes, that was it, he had been a star in prewar British films. He had gone out to Hollywood, where he had proved to be less successful; then he had returned to England to appear less and less frequently in roles of less and less importance. Then no more had been heard of him. A has-been, she indexed him in her mind, that was what he was.

‘But why Tod Hafferty?’ she had said. ‘I never knew he was a friend of yours. Or is he a friend of—?’

Dr. Morelle had put down his book and spoke through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘He is not the only individual with whom I expect to be concerned.’

Miss Frayle blinked at him while he gave his attention back to his book. She couldn’t imagine what possible interest he could have in an ex-film star. Besides, she thought irrelevantly, Tod Hafferty must be at least sixty. She wondered if he was married. She glanced at Dr. Morelle. Was it something to do with Tod Hafferty’s wife? Was that what he had meant by his cryptic remark?

She leaned forward again. ‘Who else, then?’

At that moment the train screamed into a tunnel, and her question was lost. She started to ask it once more, then decided to wait until the train was out of the tunnel. She eyed the solid blackness outside the compartment-window, which threw back her own reflection at her. She shifted her gaze along until it fastened on Dr. Morelle’s reflection.

Then the train was out of the tunnel and the darkness of the night opened out again, the lights of houses, of street-lamps and car headlights racing past formed an enigmatic pattern.

‘Who else, then, Dr. Morelle?’

‘Have you forgotten Carlton?’

She stared at him blankly. His dark gaze narrowed beneath his jutting brows raked her from over the cover of the book he was reading. With a start she saw the title. The Life and Loves of Tod Hafferty, it said; she could not make out the name of the author.

She seemed to recall that there was something scandalous about the ex-film star, some notoriety which he had brought upon himself. She wondered idly if it was this which had been responsible for the failure of his career.

She tried to recollect what it had been, what scandal had caught up Tod Hafferty and ruined him, but whatever it was, it escaped her. She looked at Dr. Morelle with rising interest. Was he interested in some case involving Tod Hafferty?

She started to question him about his apparent concern for the ex-film star, and then she remembered that he had mentioned someone named Carlton. Where did Carlton come in?

‘Who’s he?’ she heard herself saying, and then broke off with annoyance as Dr. Morelle lowered his book once again, and now she could see clearly under the title that it was by Derek Carlton.

He was tapping the book. ‘The author of this, of course.’

‘But I still don’t see what either of them have got to do with you. Tod Hafferty or, or—?’

‘Don’t you?’ He was smiling at her thinly. ‘Look in your handbag.’

Automatically she obeyed him, opening it without taking her eyes off him; she saw his glance fix itself on her hands clutching her handbag, and she looked down. It was empty, except for a gleaming hypodermic needle.

Then it was as if she was gazing into some dark whirlpool, she could hear a voice very near. It wasn’t Dr. Morelle who was speaking; as she opened her eyes, the dentist was bending over her.

‘That isn’t likely to trouble you again, Miss Frayle,’ he was saying.

‘Oh, hello?’ she said. ‘I was having a fantastic dream.’

He smiled at her sympathetically. ‘Hope it was a pleasant one.’

She nodded vaguely. She began trying to puzzle it out. The journey in the train; Dr. Morelle reading his book in the corner. Then she said: ‘How long was I unconscious?’

‘Not long. You didn’t require another shot. It was a nice, easy extraction.’

She nodded again, this time smiling wanly. She felt thankful it was all over. A surge of elation filled her, and she sat up in the chair. The anaesthetist had gone; the brunette nurse was busy in the background.

She stood up, the dentist’s hand at her elbow to steady her. She felt a little shaky, but pretty good. No pain where the wisdom tooth had been.

‘Feel all right?’

‘Perfectly,’ she said.

Ten minutes later, he was escorting her along the thickly carpeted hall to the front door. She was assuring him she would not require a taxi to take her the short distance back to the other end of Harley Street. He opened the door for her, while he asked her to convey his kindest regards to Dr. Morelle.

The door closed behind her and she stood at the top of the marble stairs which took two flights down to the street.

Beside her were the ornate gilt and black liftgates. She started to walk down, when the dentist’s words of greeting to Dr. Morelle echoing in her head made her stop. She turned back to the front door and looked at the neat brass plate over the letter-box.

Derek Carlton, the name was. That was his name. She had thought it was Derek, though she hadn’t noticed it particularly before.

She started downstairs again, frowning to herself. It was easy to understand why the reference to him had appeared in her mind while she was unconscious, though why as the author of The Life and Loves of Tod Hafferty was a bit fantastic. As fantastic as the idea of Dr. Morelle being so engrossed in the book, or in some case involving some faded film star named Tod Hafferty, whom Dr. Morelle would never have heard of.

Miss Frayle was smiling a little as she began walking up Harley Street. Tod Hafferty? She began searching her mind in an effort to remember when she had last seen him in a film.

She thought of the work which lay ahead of her; there was more than enough to be cleared up before she left with Dr. Morelle on this weekend visit tomorrow.