Hand in Glove (7 page)

“I tell you what, Mrs. M.,” Alfred said as he prepared to set the dinner table. “The weather in this household has deteriorated and the forecast is for atmospheric disturbances followed by severe storms.”

“Go on!” Mrs. Mitchell said eagerly. “How?”

“How, I don’t know. If you ask me
why
, I can give a pretty good guess. For ten years, Mrs. M., We’ve organized ourselves quietly and comfortably in the way that suits Us. Everything very nice and going by clockwork. Nothing unexpected. Settled. No upsets of any kind whatsoever. Suits Us and, incidentally, I may say, suits you and me.
Now
what? What’s the present situation? Look at today! We’ve had more upsets in this one day, Mrs. M., than We’ve had to put up with in the total length of my service.”

Mrs. Mitchell executed the toss of the head and upward turn of the eyes that had only one connotation.

“Him?” she suggested.

“Exactly. Him,” Alfred said. “Mr. Harold Cartell.”

“Good God, Mr. Belt!” Mrs. Mitchell ejaculated. “What ever’s the matter?”

“The matter, Mrs. M.?”

“The way you looked! Coo! Only for a sec. But my word! Talk about old-fashioned.”

“You’d look old-fashioned yourself,” Alfred countered, “if suggestions of the same nature were made to you.”

“By ’im?” she prompted unguardedly.

“Correct. In reference to Our cigarette case. Which, as I mentioned earlier, was left by those two on the window ledge and has disappeared. Well. As we noticed this afternoon, Mr. Cartell went off in the Bloodbath with George Copper and Bert Noakes.”

“Very peculiar, yes.”

“Yes. All right. It now appears they went to Baynesholme.”

“To the Big House?”

“Exactly.”

“Well! To see her ladyship?”

“To see
them
. Those two. They’d gone there, if you please. Unasked, by all accounts.”

“Sauce!”

“What it was all about I have not yet gathered, but will from George Copper. The point is that when I take drinks to the library just now, they’re at it hammer-and-tongs.”

“Our two gentlemen?”

“Who else? And so hot they don’t stop when they see me. At least
he
doesn’t — Mr. C. He was saying he’d forgotten in the heat of the moment at Baynesholme to ask young Leiss and that Moppett about where they’d left the cigarette case, and Mr. Period was saying the young lady, Miss Maitland-Mayne, saw it on the sill. And I was asked to say if it was there when I cleared and I said no. And I added that someone had opened the window.”

“Who?”

“Ah! You may well ask. So Mr. Cartell says, in a great taking-on, that the chaps doing the sewage in Green Lane must have taken it and my gentleman says they’re very decent chaps and he can’t believe it. ‘Very well, then,’ says Mr. C, very sharp and quite the lawyer, ‘perhaps Alfred would care to reconsider his statement.’ And the way he said it was sufficient! After that suggestion, Mrs. M., I don’t mind telling you it’s him or me. Both of us this residence will not accommodate.”

“What did our gentleman say?”

“Ah! What would you expect? Came out very quiet and firm on my behalf. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that Alfred has given us a perfectly clear picture and that there is no need to ask him to repeat it. Thank you, Alfred. I’m sorry to have troubled you.’ So, of course, I said: ‘Thank you, sir,’ with what I trust was the proper emphasis, and withdrew. But you can take it from me, there’s serious trouble and deep feeling in more than one direction. Something was said at luncheon that was very ill-received by our gentleman. Said by Mr. C. Speculation,” added Alfred, who had grown calmer and reverted to his normal habit of speech, “speculation is unprofitable. Events will clarify.”

“Why Noakes, though?” she pondered.

“Ah! And I happened to ascertain from the chaps in the lane that Noakes brought Mr. C. back in George Copper’s Bloodbath and George himself turned up in that Scorpion he’s got in his garage. And what’s more, the rural mail van gave those two a lift back. They’ve been invited to the Big House party tonight. They’re dining and staying with Miss Cartell. They were very pleased with themselves, the mail van said, but cagey in their manner.”

The kitchen door was ajar and Mr. Cartell’s voice sounded clearly from the hall.

“Very well,” he was saying. “If that should prove to be the case I shall know how to act and I can assure you, P.P., that I shall act with the utmost rigour. I trust that you are satisfied.”

The front door slammed.

“Mercy on us!” Mrs. Mitchell apostrophized. “Now what?” And added precipitately: “My bedroom window!”

She bolted from the kitchen and Alfred heard her thundering up the back stairs.

Presently she returned, flushed and fully informed.

“Across the Green,” she reported, “to Miss Cartell’s.”

“And you may depend upon it, Mrs. M.,” Alfred said, “that the objective is Miss Moppett.”

Moppett had changed into the evening dress she kept in her bedroom at Miss Cartell’s house. It was geranium red, very décolleté and flagrantly becoming to her. She lay back in her chair, admiring her arms and glancing up from under her eyebrows at Mr. Cartell.

“Auntie Con’s at a Hunt Club committee do of sorts,” she said. “She’ll be in presently. Leonard’s collecting his dinner jacket off the bus.”

“I am glad,” Mr. Cartell said, giving her one look and thereafter keeping his gaze on his own folded hands, “of the opportunity to speak to you in. private. I will be obliged if, as far as my sister is concerned, you treat our conversation as confidential. There is no need, at this juncture, to cause her unnecessary distress.”

“Dear me,” she murmured, “you terrify me, Uncle Hal.”

“I will also be obliged if the assumption of a relationship which does not exist is discontinued.”

“Anything you say,” she agreed after a pause, “Mr. Cartell.”

“I have two matters to put before you. The first is this. The young man, Leonard Leiss, with whom you appear to have formed a close friendship, is known to the police. If he persists in his present habits it will only be a matter of time before he is in serious trouble, and, if you continue in your association with him, you will undoubtedly become involved. To a criminal extent. I would prefer, naturally, to think you were unaware of his proclivities, but I must say that I am unable to do so.”

“I certainly am unaware of anything of the sort and I don’t believe a word of it.”

“That,” Mr. Cartell said, “is nonsense.”

“I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid it’s you that’s talking nonsense. All this to-do because poor Leonard wants to buy a car and I simply mention to Copper that Auntie Con — I hope you don’t mind if I go on calling her that — knows him and that you and P.P. might give him the O.K. It was only a matter of form, anyway. Of course, if we’d thought you wouldn’t like it we wouldn’t have dreamt of doing it. I’m jolly sorry we did, and Leonard is, too.”

Mr. Cartell raised his eyes and looked at her. For a moment she boggled, but only for a moment. “And I must say,” she said boldly, “we both take a pretty poor view of your coming to Baynesholme and creating a scene. Not that it made any difference with Lady Bantling. She’s asked us both for tonight in spite of whatever nonsense she may have been told about us,” Moppett announced and laughed rather shrilly.

He waited for a moment and then said: “It would be idle to discuss this matter any further. I shall turn to my second point and put it very bluntly. What did you do with Mr. Period’s cigarette case?”

Moppett recrossed her legs and waited much too long before she said: “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Precisely what I have said. You and Leiss examined it after luncheon. What did you do with it?”

“How dare you—” Moppett began. “How
dare
you—” and Leonard came Into the room.

When he saw Mr. Cartell he fetched up short. “Pardon me,” he said elegantly. “Am I interrupting something?”

Moppett extended her arm towards him. “Darling,” she said. “I’m being badgered. Can you cope?”

He took her hand and sat on the arm of her chair. “What goes on?” he asked. He was normally a white-faced young man — this characteristic at the moment was particularly noticeable.

“To be perfectly honest,” Moppett began, “I haven’t a clue. But it appears that we’re meant to know where poor old P.P. puts his museum pieces.”

“Mr. Period’s cigarette case has disappeared,” Mr. Cartell said, addressing Leonard exclusively. “You and Miss Ralston were the last persons known to handle it. You may care to make a statement as to what you did with it.”

Leonard said: “
Disappeared
! By Jove, that’s too bad, isn’t it?” His pale fingers closed tightly over Moppett’s. “Of
course
we must help, if we can. Yes, now — Yes. I do remember. I left it on the window ledge in the dining-room. You remember, sweetie, don’t you?”

“Perfectly.”

“Was the window open or shut?”

“Oh,” Leonard said easily, “open. Yes. Open.”

“Did you open it, Mr. Leiss?”

“Me? What would I do that for? It
was
open.”

“It was shut,” Mr. Cartell said, “during luncheon.”

“Then I suppose the butler-chap — what’s-’is-name — must have opened it.”

“No.”

“That,” Leonard remarked, smiling, “is what
he
says.”

“It is what I say.”

“Then I’m afraid I don’t much fancy the way you say it.” Leonard produced a silver case from his pocket, offered it to Moppett, helped himself, and with great deliberation lit both cigarettes. He snapped the case shut, smiled at Mr. Cartell and returned it to his pocket. He inhaled deeply, breathed out the vapour and fanned it with his hand. He wore an emerald ring on his signet finger. “How about the sewer men in the lane?” he asked. “Anything in that?”

“They could not open the window from outside.”

“Perhaps it was opened for them.”

Mr. Cartell stood up. “Mr. Leiss,” he said, “I consider myself responsible to Mr. Period for any visitors who, however unwelcome, come to his house under my aegis. Unless his case is returned within the next twelve hours, I shall call in the police.”

“You’re quite an expert at that, aren’t you?” Leonard remarked. He looked at the tip of his cigarette. “One other thing,” he said. “I resent the way you’re handling this, Mr. Cartell, and I know exactly what I can do about it.”

Mr. Cartell observed him with a sort of astonished disgust. He addressed himself to Moppett. “There’s no point,” he said, “in pursuing this conversation.”

A door banged, footsteps were heard in the hall together with an outbreak of yapping and long-drawn-out whines. A loud, uninhibited voice shouted: “Geddown!
Geddown
, you brute.” There followed a canine yelp and a renewed outbreak of yapping.

“
Quiet
, Li. Quiet, sweetie. Who the hell let this blasted mongrel in!
Trudi
!”

“I have changed my mind,” Mr. Cartell said. “I shall speak to my sister.”

He went out and found her, clasping a frenzied Pekingese to her bosom, kicking Pixie and shouting at her Austrian house-parlourmaid.

“My God, Boysie,” she said when she saw her brother, “are you dotty, bringing that thing in here? Take it out. Take it
out
!”

The Pekingese turned in her arms and bit her thumb.

Mr. Cartell said, with dignity: “Come along, old girl, you’re not wanted.” He withdrew Pixie to the garden, tied her to the gatepost, and returned to the hall, where he found his sister stanching her wound. The Pekingese had been removed.

“I am sorry, Constance. I apologize. Had I imagined—”

“Oh, come off it,” Miss Cartell rejoined. “You’re hopeless with animals. Let’s leave it at that. If you want to see me, come in here while I get some stuff on my thumb.”

He followed her into her “den”: a small room, crowded with photographs that she had long ago ceased to look at, with the possible exception of those that recorded the progress of Moppett from infancy to her present dubious effulgence.

Miss Cartell rummaged in a drawer and found some cotton wool, which she applied to her thumb with stamp paper and a heavy coating of some black and evil-smelling unguent.

“What is that revolting stuff?” asked her brother, taking out his handkerchief.

“I use it on my mare for girth-gall.”

“Really, Connie!”

“Really what? Now then, Boysie,” she said, “what’s up? I can see you’re in one of your moods. Let’s have a drink and hear all about it.”

“I don’t want a drink, Connie.”

“Why not? I do,” she shouted, with her inevitable gust of laughter, and opened a little cupboard. “I’ve been having a go at the Hunt Club,” she added and embarked on a vigorous exposé of a kennel maid. Mr. Cartell suffered her to thrust a whisky-and-soda into his hand and listened to her with something like despair.

In the end he managed to get her to attend to him. He saw the expected and familiar look of obstinacy come into her face.

“I can’t put it too strongly, Connie,” he said. “The fellow’s a bad lot, and, unless you put your foot down, the girl’s going to be involved in serious trouble.”

But it was no use. She said, readily enough, that she would tackle Moppett, but almost at once she began to defend her — and before long they had both lost their tempers and had become a middle-aged brother and sister furiously at odds.

“The trouble with you, Boysie, is that you’ve grown so damned selfish. I don’t wonder Désirée got rid of you. All you think of is your own comfort. You’ve worked yourself up into a stink because you’re dead-scared P.P. will turn you out.”

“That’s an insufferable construction to put on it. Naturally, I don’t relish the thought—”

“There you are, you see.”

“Nonsense, Constance!
Will
you realize that you are entertaining a young man with a criminal record?”

“Moppett has told me all about him. She’s taken him in hand, and he’s going as straight as a die.”

“You’ve made yourself responsible for Mary, you appear to be quite besotted on her — and yet you can allow her to form a criminal association—”

“There’s nothing like that about it. She’s sorry for him.”