‘Well, if you fired that sort of question at her, you can’t be surprised, can you?’
‘I didn’t. I don’t blame her. Or you. Only I’m going to marry him. I said I wouldn’t at first. I daresay you think I’m a designing hussy, but I did try to choke him off! Only – well, I couldn’t! I’m sorry I can’t produce a lot of distinguished relations. My mother came of quite humble stock, and I don’t suppose you’d like my Italian relations much. My father’s family considered that he had married very much beneath him, which, as far as birth goes, I suppose he did. His family thought him a disgrace to their stuffy name, and were extremely glad when he went to live in Italy. I lived with two of that family for eighteen months, until I decided I’d rather starve than stay with them another day. I should add that they disliked me quite as much as I disliked them, and I don’t propose ever to see them again! So now you know!’
‘One way and another, you seem to have had rather a tough time,’ said Jim equably.
She looked at him; something in her eyes made him uncomfortable. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have. But now – it seems as though I’ve been offered a chance of something I want very much. More – more than I can tell you. I’m not going to give him up. If I’ve got to fight to marry him – well, I shall fight! It’s only fair to warn you!’
‘You needn’t get ready to fight me: I’m not Timothy’s keeper. In fact, you won’t have to fight anyone. My mother may not like the marriage, but if you and Timothy really love each other she won’t try to obstruct. You’ve nothing to be afraid of from that quarter.’
‘I’m not afraid!’ she said quickly.
‘Aren’t you? Mind if I give you a bit of advice?’
‘What is it?’
‘If there’s anything about you or about your family which Timothy ought to know, tell him now! Don’t wait for him to find it out after you’re married. For one thing, it isn’t cricket, for another, a Bluebeard’s chamber in the home doesn’t make for happiness. Sorry if I’m insulting you, but I’m fond of Timothy, and I should hate him to be badly hit. He seems to me to be trusting you up to the hilt, and you don’t seem to be trusting him any way at all. Well, that’s straight from the shoulder, but you asked for it, didn’t you?’
She flushed, and her lips quivered. ‘Yes, I asked for it. I can’t explain, only – if there wasn’t any real reason why I shouldn’t marry him – ?’
He frowned at her, a little puzzled. ‘I don’t think I get what you’re driving at. Is there a reason – any kind of reason?’
‘No! But no one would believe that! No one could believe it!’
‘That sounds rather sinister! See if Timothy will believe it!’
‘No, no, he couldn’t!’
‘Well, if that’s so, you’d be well out of marriage with him, wouldn’t you?’ said Mr Kane calmly.
Eleven
While young Mr Harte had been pursuing his matrimonial plans, and while various interested persons wondered uneasily why the Chief Inspector had not again descended upon them, Hemingway had not been idle. Upon Inspector Grant’s return from his singularly barren visit to Mr SeatonCarew’s Bank, both men had visited Mr Godfrey Poulton’s mansion in Belgrave Square. Admitted by a stately butler, who regarded them with patent distaste, they were ushered into a morning-room at the back of the house a little before lunch-time, and left to kick their heels there while the butler went to ascertain his mistress’s pleasure. When he reappeared, he gave Hemingway the impression of one suffering from an acute attack of nausea. ‘Her ladyship will receive you,’ he said, overcoming his feelings sufficiently to enable him to utter these degrading words. ‘Be so good as to follow me, if you please!’
‘Will you stomach the like of this?’ muttered the Inspector, touched on the raw.
‘That’s all right, Sandy,’ said Hemingway consolingly. ‘You’ll get used to it! It’s not a bit of good thinking you can muscle into the best houses: they don’t entertain the police. You come quietly, or we shall have this poor fellow bursting a blood-vessel!’
The butler’s bosom swelled, but his countenance remained wooden. ‘This way, if you please, gentlemen!’ he said.
He led them majestically up a broad stairway to the drawing-room on the first floor, and paused outside it to demand their names. He appeared to think poorly of them, but declared them meticulously: ‘Chief Inspector Hemingway and Inspector Grant, my lady!’
The two detectives passed into the room, and the door was closed behind them.
‘Good-morning,’ said Lady Nest, from a chair by the fire. ‘Won’t you sit down?’
The room smelled of Egyptian cigarettes and hot-house roses, bowls of which stood on several tables and chests. It was furnished with a mixture of careless good taste and evanescent vulgarity. Nailed to the wall above a superb example of XVIIth century cabinet-making was the coloured plaster-head of a slant-eyed female, obviously the product of a disordered imagination; cheek by jowl with a charming piece of Wedgwood stood a bowl of ornate barbola-work, filled with potpourri; a portrait resembling nothing so much as the jumbled pieces of a jig-saw puzzle hung beside a Girtin water-colour; and enormous photographs of persons seen through a fog stood in ranks upon several spindlelegged tables. While his chief trod across the Aubusson carpet, with its design of sprawling flowers, to the fireplace, Inspector Grant retired discreetly to a chair beside one of these tables, and surveyed with dispassionate interest the portraits standing upon it. One of them, depicting the head of a handsome man, whose excellent teeth were displayed in a flashing smile, caught and held his attention. It bore little resemblance to the distorted features the Inspector had seen in Mrs Haddington’s boudoir, but it was inscribed across one corner, in dashing characters: ‘Ever yours, Dan Seaton-Carew.’
Hemingway, meanwhile, had seated himself opposite Lady Nest, uttering a conventional apology for troubling her.
‘Oh, not at all! I don’t mind!’ said Lady Nest. ‘It’s about poor Dan Seaton-Carew, isn’t it? Do you think I can help you? I will, if I can, but I don’t quite see how.’
‘We have to check up, you see, Lady Nest,’ Hemingway explained. ‘I understand that you knew Mr Seaton-Carew very well?’
She brushed some cigarette-ash from the skirt of her exquisitely plain black frock; her thin, beautiful hands had a brittle appearance, and seemed always to be fluttering. It occurred to Hemingway that he had seldom met a more restless woman. She made him think of a butterfly, at the lag end of the season, its wings a little tattered, but still flitting aimlessly here and there. ‘Oh, yes! Quite well!’ she said.
‘Perhaps you can tell me something about him?’ Hemingway suggested. ‘What, for instance, was his profession, or was he in business?’
She looked startled. ‘Oh! Oh, I don’t think so! I mean, I really have no idea! I suppose he was some kind of a financier. It didn’t interest me: I never asked him.’
‘How long had you known him, Lady Nest?’
‘I don’t know – some time now. I never remember dates. I’m sorry!’
‘Would it be a matter of months, my lady, or years?’
She gave her light laugh. ‘How persistent you are! Will anything I say be taken down and used in evidence? I shall be had up for perjury, or something dreadful. They used to say of me that I should end on the gallows, you know. Such a long time ago! You wouldn’t think it – at least, I hope you wouldn’t! – but I shall never see fifty again. So disheartening! The only thing is to make no secret of it. Terribly ageing to pretend to be younger than one really is!’
The Chief Inspector had called to interview Lady Nest more as a matter of routine than with any very real expectation of learning anything from her of value; but this speech made him suddenly alert. Not only was it artificial, but he did not think it was customary for ladies in her position to talk in that strain to police officers. She had cast the butt of her cigarette into the fire, and was already fitting another into a little jewelled holder. She had twice shifted the cushions behind her back and three ti
mes crossed and uncrossed her nylon-covered legs; her face twitched from time to time; and never were her hands still: one incessantly flicked ash from her cigarette; the other either pressed the feathery curls above her ears, or fidgeted with the row of pearls round her neck, or pleated a fold of her dress.
‘Well, as a matter of fact I knew you must be over fifty, my lady, because I used to look at your photos in all the shiny papers,’ said Hemingway brazenly.
‘No, did you? How sweet! What fun they were, those days! I sat for somebody’s face-cream, once, which maddened all my family, poor darlings! They paid me the earth for it, but of course I wouldn’t really have put the stuff on my feet !’
‘I’m sure every lady bought the cream,’ said Hemingway. ‘Did you say it was years since you first met Mr SeatonCarew, my lady?’
‘No, I didn’t say anything, and well you know it! Must I be accurate? I don’t think I can. I never have been: accurate people are such bores, and say, let me see, was it Wednesday, or Tuesday? just as though it mattered! Years. Oh dear, how many? I don’t know! Three, perhaps. Or even longer. Not a bosom friend of mine, of course: devastatingly attractive, but just the teeniest bit off-white!’
‘Were you acquainted with any of his family?’
‘Good heavens, no! Had he any family? I expect they are quite impossible: he never spoke of any relations. Not to me, at any rate. Why don’t you ask Mrs Haddington? She knew him so much better than I did!’
‘Yes, I understand they were very old friends?’
‘Oh, rather more than that, I think! Don’t look so shocked! I told you he was very attractive, but not, of course, a marrying man. I don’t blame Lilias at all: I daresay I should have done the same in her shoes. But that’s the worst of that kind of an alliance. Enchanting while it lasts, but it doesn’t generally survive the first wrinkle. And then to have a raving beauty for a daughter! I’m so thankful I never had any children: I should never have survived losing a lover to my daughter. No woman could! It would make one ridiculous. I do so much admire Lilias Haddington for managing to ignore the whole thing in that wonderfully cool way. Marvellous, isn’t she? She never turns a hair!’
‘She’s a great friend of yours, isn’t she?’ said Hemingway.
‘Oh – ! Such an exaggerated term to use! One knows her socially, just as one knows so many people!’
‘You presented Miss Haddington last year, I think. At least, that’s what I seem to remember being told.’
‘Yes. Yes, I rather took them up. Such a pretty girl, Cynthia Haddington!’
‘Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, Lady Nest, they must both of them feel they owe you a debt! Everyone knows that what you say goes in High Society.’
She smiled uncertainly, and put up a hand as though to shade her eyes from the light. ‘How kind of you! I think someone must have asked me to call on Mrs Haddington: it’s always happening. So difficult to refuse! Then one drifts into a certain degree of intimacy, really without knowing it!’
Hemingway’s eyes travelled to Inspector Grant’s face. The Inspector rose, and with a murmured excuse, walked out of the room. Following the intuition which he so often told his exasperated fellows never failed him, Hemingway said: ‘We don’t always take down what is said, and use it as evidence, my lady: particularly when we’re working on a case like this, which might turn out to be a bit delicate. Now, I don’t want to start something which, properly speaking, is none of my business; and I don’t at all want to go asking Mr Poulton a whole lot of questions which might stir up trouble.’
‘My husband! What’s it got to do with him?’ she said sharply. ‘What questions? Is it so extraordinary that I should be friendly with Lilias Haddington?’
‘Well, yes, my lady, I think it is!’ replied Hemingway frankly. ‘I thought so at the outset. I don’t move in High Society myself, but in my job one gets to learn a few whatyou-might-call elementary facts. Why did you introduce Mrs Haddington to your friends, and what was the tie-up between you, and her, and Seaton-Carew?’
She sat up jerkily from the sofa, and moved away to the window. ‘Absurd!’
‘Was it Mrs Haddington who introduced Seaton-Carew to you, my lady?’
‘No!’
‘Other way around?’ suggested Hemingway.
She put up a hand to her brow, pressing it. ‘No. How can this help you? Do you mean to ask my husband these – foolish questions?’
‘Not if I can help it. If ever there’s any suspicion of blackmail, we’re as discreet as we know how to be.’
She stared at him over her shoulder. ‘You’re very acute! Who told you this?’
‘No one told me.’
‘What makes you think – ?’
‘Mrs Haddington isn’t your sort, my lady. Nor, from what I can make out, was Seaton-Carew.’
She said quickly: ‘Put that out of your mind! There was never any question of such a thing between Seaton-Carew and me! Just an acquaintance! A man I asked to my parties!’
‘And he was pretty closely tied-up with Mrs Haddington?’
‘That had nothing to do with it! I met him in the South of France – before I knew of her existence!’
‘I see. And you met Mrs Haddington – ?’
Her thin chest heaved; she said breathlessly: ‘I need not account to Scotland Yard for my friends, I suppose!’
‘No,’ replied Hemingway. ‘You needn’t, but it might be a good thing if you did, my lady. Of course, I don’t know, but it did occur to me that you might – in a manner of speaking – have been forced to take Mrs Haddington up. Just because you didn’t want any truck with Scotland Yard.’ He smiled. ‘I often get funny ideas into my head,’ he offered. ‘You’d be surprised the number of times ladies of position go and do something indiscreet, and then don’t like to say anything about it to the police. Some of them would rather be bled white, in fact. Silly, but there it is!’
She burst out laughing. ‘Me? No one has ever bled me for a penny, Chief Inspector!’
‘You do sometimes come across blackmailers that want something other than money,’ said Hemingway thoughtfully. ‘Not often, of course, but I have heard of it.’
‘You are quite, quite mistaken!’ she said, gripping the back of a chair with both hands.
‘Well, if that’s so, I won’t trouble you any longer, my lady,’ he said, getting up.
‘I’m glad to hear it! What – what do you mean to do now?’
‘Pursue my investigations,’ responded Hemingway promptly.
Her face twitched. ‘You’d better not hint at these really rather insulting ideas of yours to my husband,’ she said. ‘He is old-fashioned in his outlook, and I fear he might resent it – quite violently! That’s just a friendly warning!’
‘I’m very grateful, my lady.’
‘You’re supposed to be enquiring into a case of murder,’ she pointed out, still gripping the chairback. ‘Neither I nor my husband had anything to do with that – indeed, how should we? I suggest you turn your attention to another household. Naturally, I don’t wish to say anything against Lilias Haddington, but she is the person most closely linked with Seaton-Carew, not I! I ought perhaps to mention that my husband was barely acquainted with him.’
‘Yes,’ said Hemingway, ‘so he told me. Still, it was quite right of you to tell me, my lady, if you thought perhaps he’d forgotten to.’
He then bade her a civil good-morning, to which she made no answer, and withdrew.
He found Inspector Grant in the hall, gravely studying a large oil painting. At a little distance, the butler stood, eyeing him austerely.
‘Wester Ross,’ said the Inspector. ‘But forbye I know where it was done, it is not good. I would not hang it in my house.’
‘Well, that’s a good job!’ returned Hemingway. ‘You wouldn’t have a chance of pinching it, not with Faithful Fido about, you wouldn’t. Come on!’
Not by so much as the flicker of an eyelid did the butler betray that this shaft had gone home. He tro
d majestically to the door, and opened it, and stood impassively by it until the two detectives had passed out of the house. His feelings found expression only in the celerity with which he closed the door behind them.
‘Almost shut my heel in it,’ remarked Hemingway. ‘Now then, my lad, what did you make of that little outfit?’
‘I should not have known what to make of that lady, had I not seen what I did,’ replied the Inspector. ‘I am thinking now that we have stepped into a deal of wickedness, perhaps.’
‘If by that you mean that she looked suspiciously like a drug-addict, I agree with you,’ retorted Hemingway. ‘I don’t know that it helps us much, though.’
‘When I was sitting in that room,’ said Grant, ‘I cast my eyes over the photographs on the table beside me. There was one with Dan Seaton-Carew signed on it. I recognised it: I had seen that face before.’