The Trouble with Harriet (22 page)

“Ben told me you recognized Mr. Price, if that’s his real name, as one of the two men on the escalator.” I removed the brandy glass from my father’s drooping hand.

“Did I say that?” He shook his head and stared dolefully into space.

“You also asked Sir Casper’s secretary, Mr. Jarrow, if he had been in Germany lately.”

“Did I?”

My eyes met Ben’s, and I knew what he was thinking. My father wasn’t sure what he remembered.

“What did you mean about a piece of cake?” Freddy stood with his arms folded, eyeing his mother.

“I don’t remember.” She was taking a leaf out of Daddy’s book.

“Yes, you do, Mumsie.”

“You’re going to be cross. But if you insist, dear, I’ll show you.” Aunt Lulu lifted a cushion off one of the Queen Anne chairs and produced her handbag. “It really was a piece of cake.” She was now unsnapping the catch. “I learned so many new tips at Oaklands, the kind that make all the difference between being an amateur and a professional. But I have to admit”—she included me and Ben in her frank gaze— “that I did feel a little quiver of alarm when I slid my hand into Mr. Price’s jacket pocket when he was starting the car with the screwdriver.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“Ellie, dear.” Auntie had her bag open. “I wasn’t afraid Mr. Price would realize and turn impolite. I learned a lot in all those late-night practice sessions at Oaklands. It was what I found in his pocket that took me by surprise.”

“Mumsie!” Freddy backed into me, sending Daddy’s brandy glass, which I was still holding, into a downward spiral that ended in a surprisingly gentle bounce on the turquoise-and-rose carpet.

“Sorry dear! I didn’t realize that I was pointing it at you.” Aunt Lulu’s eyes went to the gun she was holding. “It’s really rather sweet, isn’t it? Small and nicely balanced. Just right for a pocket. But perhaps Mr. Price has bigger ones in his suitcase.”

“You’re cheering me up no end.” Ben spoke in the bemused voice of one who feels his brain turning full circle.

“I suppose we should take it straight down to the police station,” I said.

Freddy stooped like a blind man to pick up the brandy glass. “If we do, Mumsie will have to admit she stole the gun. That’s not likely to win her any medals. And should the police catch up with Mr. Price, he may retaliate by trying to involve her. He could even say they had a row and she turned against him. Maybe they’d go light on her, but quite honestly”—he looked appealingly to me— “I don’t want to risk it.”

Ben took the brandy glass that somehow I was holding again and deposited it on the drinks table. “If only we had that damn urn and could figure out where it fits into all this.”

I expected my father to come out of his fog in response to this blasphemous reference to Harriet, but he continued to sit without a hair stirring on his head.

Squaring my shoulders, I looked at Aunt Lulu. “I wish we knew more about the Hoppers,” I said.

“In what way, Ellie?” inquired Aunt Lulu.

“In the way of your acquiring something of interest from Doris or Edith’s handbag.”

“You saw me?” Her little-girl face fell.

“No, but I noticed how alike your bag was to the one on the floor close to your chair. And I also thought the sweater you were wearing was not only pretty but also serviceable, with its baggy sleeves and fitted cuffs.”

Ben raised an eyebrow at Freddy, who shook his head, saying: “It’s a fact of life, mate. The reason men can’t cut it as detectives is that we don’t understand women’s clothes.” Meanwhile, Aunt Lulu had reopened her handbag.

“Here.” She held out her hand. “It’s not much, but it’s all there was apart from a change purse. And I wasn’t about to take that.” She beamed proudly. “It might have contained the only money the Hoppers had brought with them.”

I looked
at what she had given me: A snapshot of a reasonably attractive middle-aged woman with platinum-blond hair. And a button.

I went over to Daddy and held out the snapshot. “Is this Harriet?”

“My angel!” He clearly didn’t mean me as he clutched, as if at a lifeline, at the image of the woman he had loved and lost. “Where, oh, where, did you get this, Giselle?”

“From the Hoppers,” I hedged.

“How very generous of them. Would you believe that Harriet would never let me take a photo of her or give me one she already had?”

“Yes, I think I can believe that quite easily. Daddy, I think it’s time you took a good hard look at your relationship with Harriet. You need to ask yourself why she never gave you the number of the Voelkels’ house on Glatzerstrasse, let alone ever allowed you to visit her there, and whether it really seems credible that they were not on the telephone. Surely even a pair of eccentrics would have had one put in when they had a person staying with them who supposedly had come to Germany for medical treatment in case she needed to get hold of her doctor in a hurry.”

“Just what are you suggesting, Giselle?” He made my name sound like an indictment as he turned his Roman nose on me like a sword designed to slay dragons and undutiful daughters.

“Morley”—Ben moved over to stand in front of the fireplace— “I know the idea has to be devastating, but what if Harriet latched on to you that first evening in the biergarten because she needed someone she could con into bringing something illegal into England?”

“Perhaps because she was known to the authorities and couldn’t risk bringing that urn through herself.” I hated seeing the pain in my father’s eyes and wished desperately that my mother
could have been here to put her arms around him. Freddy, bless him, squeezed his shoulder.

“You have to admit, Uncle Morley”—he spoke with none of his usual flippancy— “that something here smells like week-old fish. That business with your luggage on the escalator and Mr. Price showing up armed and dangerous in Chitterton Fells, although where he fits in with the Hoppers is a puzzler.”

“And then there’s Mr. Jarrow,” I pointed out.

Daddy’s cheeks swelled into purple balloons, and his full lips flapped with wounded fury. “I am at a loss to understand how you can all stand there maligning one who never had an unkind word to say about anyone. When I think, Giselle, of how admiring Harriet was when I showed her the photo you had recently sent me and how she so sweetly asked if she might be allowed to keep it, your betrayal stabs me through the heart.”

“Which photo was that, Daddy?”

“One of you and Bentwick and the children.”

“And yet she would not give you one of herself.” There had to be some way of getting through to him.

“What I want to know, Ellie”—Aunt Lulu’s face was flushed with eagerness— “is what you think Morley was enticed into smuggling into this country. Was it the urn itself? Does it look valuable?”

“It’s a clay pot, not a thing of beauty or a joy forever.” Freddy, with one of his bursts of sensitivity, added, “No offense, Uncle Morley, old cock.”

“Oh, you know how nutty people can be.” Aunt Lulu flashed us a knowledgeable smile. “They’ll pay the earth for a Rembrandt they have to hide in a safe. And it’s not always about material value. A nice gentleman I met at Oaklands told me he once paid an astonishing sum to steal an ordinary teacup. Because it had sentimental value to the purchaser.”

“But it may not be the urn itself, but what’s inside, that’s important.” I sat down on the footstool in front of Daddy’s chair.

Freddy looked down at me from his lanky height. “Damn! I’m itching to take a look to find out. Meanwhile, do we conclude that the purchaser is living in this area?”

“But it’s a possibility if we accept the premise that Harriet zeroed in on Daddy because he told her he had a daughter living in Chitterton Fells. Maybe she was a woman who believed in omens. She mentioned the Gypsy, didn’t she?” I opened my hand and saw that I was still holding the button, along with the photo of Harriet, Aunt Lulu had given me. A brown button that looked as if it might have come off a coat. And I was remembering the one my Gypsy had pulled off a loose thread and told me to keep as a good-luck charm.

My father rose from his chair with a look on his face I had not seen before. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had let out a roar bringing down on our heads not only the ceiling but the entire roof.

“I will not remain in this room listening to these vile aspersions against the memory of the woman I hold most dear.” He had brought the seat cushion up with him and now shook it off like an infuriated hound before heading with a thunderous stride for the door.

“But Daddy!” I stumbled up from the footstool and went after him. “What if Harriet is more than a memory? What if she is still very much alive?”

“When did you get to thinking that Harriet is alive?” Ben asked when the drawing door closed on a final glimpse of my father’s wounded back.

“It took me longer than it should have. I can’t talk about it now.” I was close to tears. “I’ve done this all wrong, left Daddy thinking he’s alone in the world, betrayed on all sides. Why would he believe anything I have to say when he has to know deep down, inside that cocoon of his, that I’ve resented Harriet from the word go? I’m not even sure that my motives are pure. Maybe I’m a horrible, vindictive person leaping at the chance to punish him for walking out on me when I was seventeen.” I went to brush past Freddy, but he wrapped an arm around me and tickled my face with a bearded kiss.

“I’ll go up to him, Coz. You won’t get anywhere like this. You’ll fall all over yourself apologizing, retract everything, and be back to square one.”

“My little boy is right for once, Ellie.” Aunt Lulu appeared at my other shoulder. “He and Morley can have a man-to-man talk while you sit down and pour your heart out to Ben and me. Unless,” she added, sounding supremely self-sacrificing, “you would rather I got us something to eat.”

“Thanks, Aunt Lulu. You’re a rock.” Ben guided her toward the door in Freddy’s wake. “There’s a chicken-and-wild-rice casserole in the fridge that only needs the aluminum foil removed before being put in the oven for half an hour. And if you’d like to make a salad, there are lettuce and tomatoes in the crisper.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to make a loaf of bread as well?” I could hear the petulance in her voice as she disappeared into the hall. At any other time I would have felt sorry for her and the doors that were about to get slammed in the kitchen. Or, in the case of the fridge, left open.

“We could still run away to France.” Ben held me in his arms, and I could feel him smiling against my hair.

“I hate being an adult.” I stepped reluctantly away from him. “It must be great to be Aunt Lulu. A child in a woman’s body.”

“While you, Ellie, take on responsibility for everything that goes wrong in the world, whether it’s war in Afghanistan or high winds over the English Channel.”

“That’s not true,” I protested, “but I did go at Daddy all wrong.”

“He was going to be hurt whenever he was faced with the truth.”

“Does that mean, then, that you really have set aside all your doubts?” I sat looking tearily up at him from the arm of the sofa.

He stood with his hands in his jean pockets. “Call it deductive reasoning or plain old male intuition, but I’m sure Harriet made a prize chump out of Morley. I’m not sure what his role is, but it’s clear to me that Mr. Price offered Aunt Lulu a lift here because he heard her telling the railway-station employee that she had to get to Merlin’s Court and he knew that’s where your father was staying. He needed to find out if Morley still had the urn.”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, feeling suddenly more resolute and less wobbly. “Isn’t that saying someone didn’t trust Daddy to fulfill his promise to Harriet and hand over her ashes to the Hoppers?”

“It looks that way.”

“Even so, why tip us off that there’s something fishy going on?” I plucked at a loose thread in the sofa’s ivory damask. “Wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to get in touch with the Hoppers first to find out from them where the situation stood?”

“Of course.” Ben shifted me from the arm of the sofa onto one of the seat cushions and sat down beside me. “But I’ve got Mr. Price sized up as a bungler. He shows up in Chitterton Fells a day late. Your father arrived yesterday. Perhaps he had to go back to headquarters because he had forgotten his gun or had lost his list of laboriously written out instructions. Equally stupidly, he probably thought a change of clothes and a pair of glasses enough of a disguise to prevent your father from recognizing him from the airport.” Ben leaned his head back. “I remember talking to a detective inspector once when I was working in a London restaurant, and he told me, ‘We at the Yard may not all be Sherlock Holmeses, but we certainly beat most of the competition.’ “

“There could be the psychological factor.” I had to raise my voice because the grandfather clock was striking seven. It might have been the reverberations, but for a moment I thought I heard a car engine.”

“What do you mean, Ellie?”

“Well”—setting aside auditory distractions— “if you’re right about Mr. Price’s real profession, maybe he thinks of himself as invisible much of the time. Isn’t it supposed to be the mark of a good butler to fade into the background during the performance of his duties? To be just a voice granting admittance to his employer’s presence or a pair of hands carrying in the tea tray? And if the other man at the airport, the one who tried to push Daddy down the escalator, was his boss, Mr. Price would have considered himself on the job at the time.”

“Then let’s say the boss was injured to the point of incapacitation after falling down the escalator. He might have been embarrassed, not to say nervous, about notifying whoever hired him to snatch your father’s suitcase that he’d botched things. What to do? He instructs his butler to stop polishing the silver or inventorying the bed linen and toddle down to Chitterton Fells.”

“That could explain Mr. Price showing up here a day late. The boss could have been out of it at first with a concussion or frantically trying to find someone more reliable to take over.” I nestled comfortably into the best cushion of all, my husband’s shoulder. “But even if we’re right about Mr. Price and his boss, there’s something that doesn’t make any sense. Why try to snatch Daddy’s suitcase after Harriet had set up her scheme to have him deliver the urn to the Hoppers?”