Читать книгу The Beckoning Lady - Margery Allingham - Страница 9

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Mr Campion, telephoning from a seat on the bed in the room over the kitchen at The Beckoning Lady, thought he had never had such difficulty in persuading authority to notice a corpse before.

His old friend Sir Leo Pursuivant, the Chief Constable at Kepesake, wanted to talk about everything else; his well-remembered voice came crackling over the wire.

‘Campion. My dear fellow. Couldn’t be more pleased. Heard you were down. For Tonker’s party, I suppose? I said to Poppy, hope to goodness we see something of them. We shall all be there on Saturday. Poppy’s going to run the bar. Minnie kindly asked her. She’s been prinking herself up all this week. Not enough of that sort of jollification these days down here. Money tight and life dull. I pulled a tendon in my foot so I’m stuck at the desk, but I shall be there on the day, please God. Amanda all right? And the boy? Poor William, eh? I didn’t come over. He wouldn’t have wanted it. Would have wanted to slip off quietly without casting a blight. What was it? Anno Domini? Ah, gets us all in the end. Seems a pity. What’s your news, my boy? Still turning up interesting things?’

‘I don’t know.’ The caller got a word in at last and proceeded to explain.

‘A body? Dead man?’

Mr Campion could envisage the mottled hand feeling first for the pen and then for the pince-nez on the thick black cord. ‘Found it yourself, did you? God bless my soul, Campion, what an extraordinary feller you are! You’re at Harriet’s mill, are you?’

‘No sir. The Beckoning Lady. We found the corpse just now, coming along. Lugg went back to report it to the bobby and I came on here to the phone.’

‘Ah. Unfortunate just at this time. It’s not actually on The Beckoning Lady land, I hope, is it?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen a soul to ask. I came straight up to the telephone. It’s in a ditch by the side of the footpath. Do you know the country?’

‘Shot over it all my life. There’s an old embankment, full of birds in winter. Start from there.’

That’s it. Just there. There’s a stile ...’

‘With a bridge by it. I know. Just in there, is it? Thank goodness for that. That’s not Minnie’s. Very well, my boy, we’ll see to that for you. Keep the young people out of the way and give us a couple of hours. No need to alarm the women.’

An involuntary smile twisted Mr Campion’s wide mouth. ‘It may not be quite as simple as that,’ he said cautiously. ‘I didn’t like to disturb anything so I can’t tell you much, but he’s very dead, he doesn’t look like a local product, and he’s got a tremendous hole in his head. Death must have been instantaneous.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Not natural causes?’

‘No. Blunt instrument. Perhaps not quite so blunt.’

‘Very well.’ There was a note of resignation in the pleasant voice. ‘The Superintendent will come down at once. Pussy’s gone, you know, but we’ve got a new fellow called Fred South. He’s been in the Urban area for years and is finishing his time with us. He’s very intelligent and uncommonly quick by our standards. Where will he find you? Still with Minnie?’

Mr Campion hesitated. ‘I was going to ask you about that,’ he said. ‘Lugg actually found the body. I am on holiday—er—technically, and I wondered if I need be called as a witness?’

The Chief grunted. ‘That’s the most suspicious thing I ever heard you say. Still, Lugg will do. Tell him to stick to his story.’

‘Chief Inspector Charles Luke is staying with us,’ Mr Campion suggested diffidently. ‘I don’t suppose for a moment that you’ll want to call in the Yard, but if you do I thought you’d care to know that there’s a good man already here.’

Leo showed unexpected interest. ‘Luke? I want to meet him, he’s a brave chap, Campion. I read about it. A gallant officer. Nice type too, eh? Good. Well, I’ll get South’s report and if it warrants it I’ll telephone London. I’ve been thinking. You know what this will turn out to be? Motorists.’

Mr Campion’s bewildered expression faded. ‘As opposed to local people who drive cars?’ he suggested.

‘Eh? Yes, that’s what I said. Motorists. Terrible fellers from God knows where. Depend upon it, one of those has run down some poor feller, carted him for twenty miles or so, and then got rid of him. That’s about it. What did you say?’

‘I said it’d be a long way to carry him. He’s lying half a mile from the road.’

‘Is he?’ Leo sounded unimpressed. ‘All the same, the Yard are the best people to deal with a killer of that kind. They’ve got the machinery, they know the type. Good-bye my boy. I hope we meet on Saturday. Good Lord yes, Poppy would never forgive me if anything happened to stop that.’

Mr Campion sent his love to that plump and smiling lady who had once been the darling of the musical-comedy stage and had married Leo late in his widowerhood. He also took the opportunity to ask after Janet, Leo’s daughter by his first wife. She had married a sort of friend of Campion’s own, one Gilbert Whippet, now Chairman of the Mutual Ordered Life Endowment Insurance Company—‘the Mole’, in the vernacular—and he heard with gratification that they too could be expected at the party. It promised to be quite a gathering.

As he hung up he glanced about him curiously. He found the entire room surprising, inasmuch as it appeared to be his hostess’s own. At any rate, the painted four-poster which he remembered from the studio in Clerkenwell quite twenty years before had been moved in here from the great sunlit chamber in the front of the house which she and Tonker had shared in the early days of her return to the country. All round the walls were treasures peculiarly Minnie’s own. There was her father’s head of a cherub, the exquisite Rushbury water-colour and Edmund Blampied’s superb drawing of a farm horse, with ‘For Minnie on her birthday’ inscribed under the signature. Campion looked for the famous caricature which Tom Chambers gave them, and found it on the other side of the bed. He went round to look at it again: ‘The Eternal Charleston, Minnie and Tonker, 1928’.

The drawing made him laugh now as it had then; Minnie, shown as more than half a mule with her long nose and wicked eye, was wearing a dress of the period, its short skirt made of the Union Jack and the long-waisted blouse of the Stars and Stripes. On her head was a brave’s full head-dress, with paint brushes dripping where feathers should have been. It was wickedly like her, yet the masterpiece was Tonker. Tom had drawn Tiger Tim as he had appeared in the weekly comic paper of that name, and had apparently lifted the animal completely. There was the jaunty back, the overstuffed paws, and the waving tail, yet every line of the figure was also irrefutably Tonker himself, truculent, sandy, and thinking of something dangerous to do. They were dancing, or fighting, and the dust rose in clouds from under their feet.

Mr Campion was still contemplating it when the door was kicked open and a small woman came pattering in. She did not see him immediately because she was carrying a newly-pressed dress on a hanger high in front of her, in an attempt to save its trailing hem, but as he swung round she heard him and peered across the bed. He saw it was Emma Bernadine.

Emma was a handmaid of the arts. When he had first met her she was painting children’s white wood tuck-boxes to look like pirate chests. In those days she had been a sly-eyed little party, much younger than the crowd which had grown up with Minnie, but she had strung along with them and, when Jake Bernadine’s first wife had given up in despair, had married and mothered him, enjoyed his strange pictures, and had children by him. Just before the arrival of the twins they had borrowed the cottage on The Beckoning Lady estate for a summer holiday and, since the landlord of their Putney studio had taken that opportunity to distrain upon their goods, had not yet gone away again.

It was some years since Campion had set eyes on her and he saw with interest that she had become a type in the interim, stocky and cheerful and quite happy in the exhausted fashion of the times.

She was wearing a bright blue dress of coloured sheeting, embroidered across the shoulders with huge hand-worked flowers, a black sateen peasant apron, and rope-soled shoes, while her head was wrapped in a dinner napkin, cunningly creased as long ago in good houses they used to serve bread.

‘Hullo,’ she said, ‘why aren’t you working?’

‘I suppose people really do say things like that.’ Mr Campion sat down on the bed, since there was no chair.

‘Get up, don’t make a mess, be careful, look out.’ She shooed him away as she spread the dress on the counterpane, and he looked at it dubiously. It was a minute print, grey on white, and seemed to be very plain.

‘Minnie’s, for the party. I made it. We hunted everywhere for the material and found it at last at the village shop. It must have been there in one of the stock drawers for seventy years. Ninepence a yard and we starched it. Isn’t it very nice?’

‘Very,’ he agreed and hunted for a word, ‘restrained.’

She screwed up her eyes and stood looking at it. ‘Oh not bad, it will look odd, you know, and rather good.’ She pulled a seam out carefully and stood back. ‘Jake is painting mine,’ she remarked. ‘I sized a piece of calico and ran it up, and he’s doing his damnedest. I must get back before he decides it’s too good to wear and cuts the skirt up to frame. Isn’t it fun, but isn’t it exhausting! My feet ...’

Mr Campion looked dismayed. ‘You make me feel elderly,’ he said. ‘Is it still worth it?’

‘Oh yes,’ she assured him, her round face packed with earnestness. ‘It’s our only chance of seeing anyone at all. It’s killing while it lasts and the clearing up takes months, but at least one’s alive for a few hours. You don’t know what it’s like down here in the winter, sweetie. Not a sound. Not a voice. Only you and the radio. I exist from one of Tonker’s parties to the next.’

The conversation threatened to become emotional.

‘I haven’t seen Minnie yet,’ he said, hastily. ‘I wanted to phone and someone in the kitchen sent me up here. I’m in her bedroom, I suppose?’

‘You are. The telephone’s here, you see. It’s the only one. There’s a bell in the front hall and when it rings you have to run like stink before the caller gives up. Perfectly insane but there you are! Have you seen the rooms I’ve redecorated for Minnie?’

She took his sleeve to hurry him and he found himself dragged first into Minnie’s old bedroom and then into the smaller one beside it, where there had been a transformation. His first impression revisiting the old house had been that it was shabby in the pleasant way in which old homes crumble, but in the two bedrooms now so proudly displayed a start had been made. They were a little arty in their sprigged chintz petticoats, even a little dated, but they looked comfortable and the beds were plump and new, and there was running water.

Emma looked round her and sighed. ‘Oh lovely,’ she said earnestly.

‘Pleasant,’ he agreed. ‘Who sleeps here?’

‘Just exactly who you’d think!’ said Emma. ‘Nobody at all, of course. What a life, eh? So far round the bend we meet ourselves coming back. Run along. See you later. I’m dying to talk but I haven’t got time. Look up old Jake. He’s doing some very new stuff. Ask about it. Don’t just look.’

‘I will.’ He tried to sound enthusiastic and went off down the staircase. On the first landing there was a magnificent leaded window overlooking a flower garden and he paused to glance out at the blazing mass of colour. The drive was a little shaggy he had noticed coming along, and the kitchen garden was a wilderness. But here there was a display which would have done credit to a Dutch bulb-grower’s catalogue. The effect was blinding; arches and trellises, vines and crawling roses, massed one on top of the other in ordered glory. The wide river, shallow as a ford, was almost obscured by the show. One small opening draped with clematis and lacevine had been left, however, and as his eye was drawn towards it he saw Rupert pass by on the other side. He blinked. Unless he had been utterly deceived, the item clutched to his boiler-suited bosom had been a magnum of champagne. Campion saw the gleam of the gold paper distinctly. Before he had had time to clear his mind, another child passed the archway. She was a fat little person clad solely in yellow pants, and a squaw’s single feather. She too carried a gaudy bottle. Behind her came a boy two or three years older, and behind him a girl in her early teens. They were all vaguely Red Indian in costume, and were all laden with the same sensational freight, which they carried with earnest concentration. The operation appeared to be secret and of a military character.

Campion was turning away when he saw two more laden children go by. A trifle dazed, he went on down the stairs. The door of the room which had been Minnie’s mother’s drawing-room was directly in front of him and he could not resist putting his head in to see the Cotman again. The white-panelled room was much as he remembered it, but the picture had gone. There was a flower-piece of Minnie’s own in its place, but the magic water-colour, so passionate under its placidity, had vanished for ever. Saddened, he pushed open the door of the old front kitchen which was now, it seemed, the family dining-room. There was a Swedish cooking-stove in place of the old range, a tiled floor, and an elm farm table scrubbed white and surrounded by innumerable stools. It was all very tidy and spartan and pleasant, and he passed on into the back kitchen where nothing, as far as he could see, had changed since the house was built. It was a dim, whitewashed shell of a place, very large, with a worn stone floor and a flat stone sink with a hand pump over it. Two doors, one leading into the garden and one into the yard, stood wide open, letting in the sunny air.

At work at the sink was the woman he had seen briefly before in his search for the telephone, and as he came drifting in she turned to give him a wide china smile.

‘Found it, duck?’ Her accent was as riotously cockney as Lugg’s own, and as Campion glanced at her he thought she could have sprung from no other place. She was a mighty woman, tall as he was, and built on aggressive lines, like a battle ship, with a square squat head to which the iron-grey hair was bound as tight as possible in an intricate mystery of tiny plaits. He guessed that she was in the sixties but she was powerful still, and hearty, with a merry eye and clear fresh shining skin. Her pinafore under the tweed apron, cut lightheartedly at some time from a pair of trousers, was gay to the point of silliness, and earrings as big as curtain rings, with a tin bird perching on each, brushed her plump shoulders where a wisp or two of hair which had escaped the plaits hung free.

The general effect was sobered a little by a black band suspiciously like the top of a woollen stocking, which was pinned to the short sleeve above an arm as thick and powerful as a navvy’s. He suspected that she had been talking to herself, for as he appeared she went straight on, merely raising her voice to include him into the party. ‘It’s not right, is it?’ she was saying—‘ ’Im ’ardly in ’is grave yet, poor old dear. We know ’e was old but then that’s a thing we’ve all got to come to. Surely you can put the Londoners’ outin’ off, dear, for a week or ten days? I said. No I can’t, she said, and that’s flat. You don’t understand. We can’t back out of it now. Can’t? I said, there’s no can’t about it. Oh shut up! Dinah, she said. They call me Dinah, though me name’s Diane. Miss Diane Varley. I’ve never bin married. But Mrs Cassands was upset. I could see it, though some people couldn’t. Well, she would be. ’E was like a father to ’er and me. We was just ’is girls to ’im. I’m speaking of ’er uncle, Mr William that was, a saint on earth except for ’is bottle.’

Mr Campion, whose face had been growing more and more blank, took himself in hand. One item in the harangue stood out as an insult to his intelligence. He knew for a fact that this sterling example of a type which was as familiar to him as the city itself, could never have escaped matrimony. Glancing at her left hand he saw at once the bone-deep crease of the wedding ring. Fortunately she was wiping her eyes with the corner of the tweed apron and did not notice his stare.

‘Oh I miss ’im,’ she said brokenly. ‘I’ve cried meself sick every night. Bleary old nuisance, ’e was, and I’ve told ’im so until I was sick of it. I know ’e was lucky to be took so quick. Sometimes they lie and lie. But all the same it was sudden. Old Harry was here, and we was sitting up. We ’adn’t gorn ’ome because Mr Will seemed queer and I didn’t like to leave ’im to Mrs Cassands while Mr Tonker was down. She doesn’t ’ave a lot of time with ’im. Just before twelve I said to Harry—that’s my friend—I said, “I’ll take ’im some of this ’ere tea, because ’e may wake up and then ’e’ll want it.” So I did, and I went in talking like I always do. “There you are, you old lump of love,” I said, “nice and ’ot,” and I turned up the light and then of course I dropped the cup.’

The thin man was gratifyingly interested.

‘Mr Farraday was only ill for a day, was he?’

‘ ’E wasn’t ill at all,’ she protested. ‘You’d ’ave soon ’eard about it if he was ill. If ’e was poorly ’is little bell rang night and day. ’E was only sleeping. They do. Old people sleep and sleep until you wonder why they bother to wake up.’

‘What did the doctor say?’

‘What could ’e say? Said ’e was dead. I could ’ave told ’im that. ’Is poor old jaw was tied up by the time the doctor saw ’im.’

She returned to her pail of soapsuds.

‘ ’E agreed it was sudden. Told us ’ow lucky we was. Said ’is ’eart ’adn’t seemed so bad, but at ’is age and with ’is ’istory we couldn’t be surprised at anything, and signed the doings. But we was surprised. The old chap ’isself wouldn’t ’ave believed it if ’e ’adn’t ’ad to.’

‘He wanted to live, did he?’ Mr Campion had seen his old friend for a few minutes the week before his death, and had seen then that he was very tired. He was happy enough, but weary, and like some crumpled baby seemed anxious to get his head down to sleep.

‘Come Gumper,’ said Miss Diane unexpectedly. ‘ ’E’d made up ’is mind to live till Gumper night. ’E told me so.’

Mr Campion blinked at her and she laughed.

‘That’s what they call it down ’ere,’ she explained. ‘Gumper treason and plot. Guy Fawkes night to us Londoners, bonfire night. My old love said ’e was goin’ to live till then. “That’s right,” I said, “go to ’eaven on a rocket, so you shall.” But ’e didn’t. Midsummer night, more like. That’s what Saturday is, Mr Tonker’s party. Midsummer night, and William lyin’ out there missin’ all the bubbly.’

She rubbed soap in her eyes and distracted herself, and at that moment there was a shrill shout from Emma somewhere in the house.

‘Four o’clock, Dinah!’

‘Four o’clock!’ echoed Miss Diane and rushed to put her head out of the garden door. ‘Four o’clock, Spurgeon!’

‘Four o’clock!’ an answering bellow resounded from the border, and Mr Campion, who was taken off guard, was just in time to see a man in a straw hat fling down his hoe among the lilies and sprint towards the house. He diagnosed some domestic emergency, but it seemed to be merely a matter of fetching coke from the shed to the kitchens. The operation was conducted at the double and was followed by a headlong dash with the garbage pails to the incinerator, after which the man strode away upstream from where, for some time past, there had come the sound of hammering.

The whole incident was mildly lunatic and Campion was still astonished by it when a voice he recognized floated in from the yard, and Minnie with a boy of about sixteen came in, carrying a load of stacked zinc baths between them.

Visitors from easy-going New York, which will suffer parading Irish and piping Scots without a qualm, were sometimes taken aback by a first sight of Minnie on her own home ground. Latter-day Rip Van Winkles had been known to pour themselves drinks with shaking hands, whilst under the impression that the classic adventure had somehow overtaken them in reverse. Minnie’s America had been handed down to her by her father, who had left that country in 1902 and had not then been considered an advanced member of his generation. Like most painters, he was a simple and direct personality of strong affections, and his favourite authors were those of his childhood: Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper, and Louisa Alcott. Minnie visited the country and kept up with her relatives there, but neither experience had succeeded in modernizing her view. She too was a simple obstinate person with the memory of an elephant, who wore strange clothes. In her youth she had adopted the Mother-Hubbard as the perfect garment to suit her angularity and the eagle’s beak nose of the Straws. She always worked with a stout apron for painting, and now, after twenty-five years, these had become as normal a part of her appearance as her John bob and piercing grey eyes. Since The Beckoning Lady was the kind of place where a covered wagon might easily be standing just round the corner, the effect at times was disconcerting. At the moment she looked tired and a trifle harassed but it was clear that she was enjoying herself and in command of a complex situation.

The boy was very like her and was almost as tall. His hair was a corn-coloured mat and the laughter-wrinkles were already deep across his forehead and round his eyes. They planted the baths on the stones with a clatter and Minnie held out her hand.

‘Albert, how nice of you. Amanda told us you were here. There’s a frightful lot to do still. You haven’t met Westy, have you? Isn’t it a blessed miracle? He’s in quarantine for mumps. Sent home from school last night. The angels do take care of us. Now, this is Westinghouse Straw, my grand-nephew. My father married twice, you know.’ She had a slow deep voice, very English in intonation.

The youngster shook hands. ‘After that you just have to work it out,’ he said with a hint of apology, which reminded Campion of Leo mopping up after one of Poppy’s clangers. ‘My sister and I are the children of the painter’s eldest son. Our parents wanted us educated over here, and so we just moved in on Minnie. Annabelle is over at the boat house, keeping an eye on the chain-gang, or at least we hope so. Aunt Hatt’s dog is minding the cellar, and at least we know he’ll raise the roof if anything happens.’

Minnie sat down at the table and sagged a little.

‘Wouldn’t it be awful if they started opening them?’ she said. ‘That would shake old Tonker.’

Westy shot a horrified glance at her. ‘They might,’ he said. ‘You don’t seem to know how young they are.’

‘They’re all right.’ Minnie spoke with complete conviction. ‘They’ve got an orange-juice bar they’re running down there, and they’re all going over to the cottage for tea in a minute.’

‘I didn’t think they’d drink it,’ said Westy with dignity, ‘but they might pull the wires off to hear the bang.’

‘Nonsense, they’re not fools.’ She had the sublime faith of her type of matriarch. ‘I never have stupid children here. Now.’ She fished in the pocket of her skirt and brought out a bundle of crumpled lists fastened with a safety-pin. ‘That’s done the baths. You’ll clean them, Dinah, will you? They’re only dusty. Then, when you’ve finished, write Ice with this bit of chalk on the two best, and leave them all here. Albert, would you like to catch the donkey?’

‘Frankly,’ said Mr Campion, who had met the beast, ‘no.’

‘I agree,’ put in Westy hastily. ‘That’s a job for Jake, Minnie. He likes it.’

‘Well, will you see he does? Then you can harness the tub, and the baths and the six boxes of glasses can all go down together. Don’t forget to get yourself some tea. This goes on for days and you’ll get utterly exhausted and hate it if you don’t eat. Have a lump of cake now.’

‘Okay ma’am, I’ll get it as I go by. Any message for the cottage?’

She examined the list carefully. ‘No—unless ... “Tell Jake about stomach” ... Westy, I wonder if that wouldn’t come better from you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Well—’ she hesitated and her fierce eyes were deeply serious, ‘—no one minds how a man dresses nowadays, and all that sort of rubbish has gone for good, but sometimes when people haven’t seen one before and they’re new to the place they get sort of embarrassed. Do you see what I mean?’

Westy began to laugh. He had just reached the age when the full rich absurdity of his elders had burst upon him in glorious treasure-trove.

‘In other words, if Jake won’t shave and doesn’t have a hair cut, he must do up his shirt?’ he suggested.

Minnie’s laughter, which always seemed to take her unawares, burst from her famous nose in a snort.

‘Well, the bottom buttons anyway,’ she said, ‘if he does up the neck. It’s the great bow-tie and hairy belly effect which gives strangers a start. Do you think you could put it to him really tactfully? Be careful. He’s a funny boy. You know what happened once.’

‘When someone tipped him?’

‘Yes, well, that was utterly unforeseen. It’s so unusual nowadays. The poor man was a Jewish box manufacturer and one of Wally’s best clients. He had a Rolls and Jake liked the lines of it, so he showed him how to get it in without scratching it. The man gave him half a dollar and, oh dear!’

The boy was sympathetically serious. ‘He hit him, didn’t he?’ he said gravely.

‘Hit him!’ Minnie was indignant. ‘Not only did he throw him down so that he was stunned, but he took all his money, about thirty pounds. He sent ten pounds of it to the Artists’ Benevolent Fund right away that afternoon, and threw the rest in the pond. My God, there was a row!’

‘What happened?’ Mr Campion was forced to ask the question in spite of himself.

Minnie went back to her list. ‘Oh, Tonker squared it,’ she said indifferently. ‘The man was awfully decent about it. They all came to stay afterwards. Nice noisy people. I painted the daughter. A name like Potter-Higham. Oh Westy, the chairs from the village hall.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll talk to Scat. He’s up here working on the wherry. That’s going to be whacky. Be seeing you.’ He padded off, calling in at the pantry on his way.

‘Sent by God,’ said Minnie casually. ‘What on earth would happen without them all? I can’t go tearing about like a two-year-old. Painting the house nearly killed me.’

‘Landscape? That’s a new departure.’ Campion was interested and she grinned at him.

‘Don’t be a clot. I mean the house. We colour-washed it, Dinah and I, in April. Didn’t you notice?’

Mr Campion regarded her with astonishment. ‘I thought it looked very nice,’ he said.

‘It bleary well ought to,’ remarked Diane from the sink. ‘She did the top and I did the bottom. Gord we was in a mess! And stiff—blimey!’

‘But why?’

‘Because it looked like death,’ said Minnie frankly. ‘We concreted Will’s little terrace as well, and now he’ll never use it. Oh dear, I do miss the old pet, Albert. I keep thinking I hear his little bell. He used to ring when he wanted anything.’

‘And when you took your ’ands out of the water and dried ’em and got in there, ’e’d forgotten what it was,’ added Diane, laughing.

‘You saw the room we made him out of the old dairy, did you?’ Minnie hoisted herself to her feet. ‘Come and look. It made it possible. Once he was bedridden we couldn’t manage the stairs. It’s very pleasant. Scat—that’s Scatty Williams’ son, you remember—knocked a south window in for me so that he could see the river.’

As she spoke she led him out into the garden and along a bricked path to the disused dairy. The door was locked but she produced the key from her pocket and they went in. It had made a charming room which as yet was much as its owner had left it, and all the homeliness and sharp realism of old age was there. There was no design and no pretence, but great comfort and an airiness unusual in such apartments. The new window reached from floor to ceiling and outside there was a little concrete platform just big enough for the high hospital bed to be wheeled out upon it.

Minnie sat down in the rocking-chair before the window. ‘I used to sit here and mend, and shout at the old villain,’ she said. ‘He was quite happy, you know, Albert,’ she said. ‘He used to sleep all day and nearly all night, but he wasn’t bored and he wasn’t a fool.’

Mr Campion was wandering about the room. The pathetic medicines were still on the mantelshelf: talc and old-fashioned pills and a small white box labelled ‘The tablets’.

‘How did he get here in the first place?’ Campion said presently, taking up the box and eyeing its contents through one lens of his glasses. ‘Did he get left over at a party, or did Tonker bring him to you as a birthday present or something?’

‘No.’ She seemed to be wondering about it herself. ‘Oh, I remember. Of course. He was evacuated. They bombed London.’

‘So they did,’ he agreed. ‘And he drifted down here, then, did he, and just settled?’

‘I suppose he did,’ she admitted. ‘We’d known him for ages before that. He was a good old boy, Albert.’

‘I liked him,’ said Campion. ‘He had such stupendous innocence. What are these things in here?’

‘Those?’ She edged round to look at the box he held out to her. ‘Pluminal, I think. He used to have one a night, sometimes two in the latter part of the time. The doctor gave it to us. He used to take it with his last drink.’

Mr Campion put the box back and moved on to the chest of drawers where, in lonely glory, stood Uncle William’s tantalus. The centre bottle had still a quarter-inch of Scotch in it, and from the little drawer below an orange envelope of a kind now familiar in Britain peeped out unblushingly.

‘Football pools?’ he inquired. ‘Did he still do those?’

‘Rather! And he still had a bit on a horse. One of the last things he did was to pay his bookie. Old Solly L., you know. He’s coming to the party. It was a whacking great bill, I’m afraid, but Will paid it and it left him pretty well broke. Solly was overcome. He came down to see him. They had a glorious session. I thought he’d given Will a new lease of life. I filled the pools in, of course. They’re a must, aren’t they?’

Mr Campion considered querying this remarkable statement but changed his mind. At the moment, Uncle William’s death was his chief concern. So he said instead:

‘I suppose that window was kept wide all day?’

‘Not lately,’ she said sadly. ‘He’d started getting so cold.’

Mr Campion crossed the room to stand beside her, and looked down over the flowers at the stream.

‘Was he insured?’ he inquired with uncharacteristic bluntness.

Minnie glanced at him oddly. ‘No dear, he wasn’t. He was too old before he thought of it and besides—’ she hesitated and finally laughed. ‘He’d given most of his money to me you know—made it over to me four and a half years ago. That’s why he wanted to live to November. The five-year gift period ended then and there wouldn’t have been death duties to pay. I don’t think it was wrong of me to take it in the first place, do you? I was in a jam and he hadn’t a soul in the world.’

‘I know he hadn’t and, even so, my dear girl, he couldn’t have bought this kind of care for any money on earth.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ She sighed. ‘Oh my dear, I can’t bear it, let’s go out of here and look at some pictures.’

Mr Campion was sealing an envelope he had taken from his pocket, and he tucked it away before moving.

‘Doctor sensible?’ he inquired casually.

Minnie rose. ‘Very young,’ she said, ‘but quite all right. I think he felt we were making a lot of fuss over a foregone conclusion.’

The tall man smiled at her. ‘All the same, he wasn’t surprised when it happened.’

‘Well he was, rather, oddly enough.’ Minnie was fastening the window. ‘So were Gordon Greene and Sir Frederick Hughes. They came down to give the old darling a complete check-up last spring, and they said then he ought to be good for a couple of years. However, go he did, poor pet, so it couldn’t be helped. Well, there it is. Come along.’

She led him out and relocked the door after them. ‘I just want to leave it exactly as it was for a bit,’ she said.

Mr Campion spoke on impulse. The matter had been in his mind for some time, but his curiosity brought it to a head.

‘I was going to approach you professionally, Miranda Straw,’ he began. ‘I was wondering if we ought not to have a portrait of Amanda while her hair is still red.’

Minnie appeared interested but embarrassed.

‘The full treatment?’ she inquired. ‘I’m afraid it would have to go through Fang’s.’

‘So I should hope. None genuine without,’ he agreed lightly as she paused to look at him, her head on one side.

‘I’d love it. There’s something there to put down. I could fit it in too, I think, but it’ll cost you a pretty penny, my lad.’

He was undisturbed. ‘I thought it might. But Rupert will bless us later on. I’ll talk to Copley of Fang’s.’

‘If you do, I’ll do my damnedest to get it in this year. I’ve got to start on an Australian beauty next month, but the rest can move back one.’

‘Right. I’ll hold you to it. Things are booming, are they? Did I see something about the Boston Art Gallery?’

Her strange fierce face glowed. ‘You did, thank God,’ she said. ‘It’s marvellous. Four. Two flower-pieces, Mrs Emmerson, and Westy. It’s a queer mixture, isn’t it, flowers and women and kids? And yet I suppose you can’t really photograph any of them without either sentimentality or brutality, and mine’s an essentially realistic approach, even if it is a bit individual. Remind me to show you something.’

They were back in the kitchen again when he put his last question.

‘Have you seen a stranger near here lately, Minnie?’ he inquired. ‘About eight or nine days ago; a man in a raincoat?’

He got no further. Behind him there was a crash like the end of the world as Miss Diane dropped a zinc bath on the flagstones. In the instant before he swung round he saw that Minnie’s expression of mild curiosity had not changed. However, there was still sensation to come. As if the clatter had been a roll on the drums, a shadow fell over the bright doorway to the yard and Mr Lugg, breathing like a porpoise, and indeed looking not unlike one, his face dark with exertion, stepped heavily into the room with a limp body in his arms.

‘ ’Ere’s another,’ he gasped as he planted it on the table, where it stirred and moaned. ‘Cut ’er stay lace. She ain’t ’arf ’ad a shock.’ He turned to Miss Diane by instinct.

‘Give us a drink, duck. Anything but water. I ’ad to carry ’er the last few yards.’

Mr Campion’s horrified stare left Lugg for the sufferer on the table and he saw to his astonishment that it was his grave-tending friend of the morning, the secretary to the bird-watching Fanny Genappe, Miss Pinkerton of the Pontisbright Park Estate.