Dorothy Eden (65 page)

‘Why, after lunch, I think it was. They were waiting to go out. The sweet little innocents. They were waiting for their coats, I think. No, let me see, it was much later that I heard them playing in the garden. Really, dear, I couldn’t say when they went to the park. Don’t tell me they’re not home yet.’

Brigit shook her head.

‘But gracious, it’s almost dark. Nicky will be quite frightened. Oh, listen! Isn’t that them now?’

Surely enough, it was. Brigit breathed a sigh of deep relief as she heard Nicky shrilly making some explanation, and then the rapid patter of feet approaching her door.

Prissie came in first. Now, instead of being agitated she was brightly flushed, and her eyes were shining with what looked like intense excitement. Or was it apprehension?

‘Mrs Gaye, I found the children in the park. Nicky said he didn’t know it was so late. He said he had managed to get Sarah across the road quite safely. The cars had stopped for him.’ Prissie gave a breathless almost hysterical giggle. ‘They were alone, Mrs Gaye,’ she said.

‘But Nurse Ellen? Where is she?’

‘That’s what we don’t know. Nicky said they waited an awfully long time for her and when she didn’t come he decided to take Sarah himself.’

‘I did, Mummy,’ Nicky said eagerly. ‘She was quite safe with me.’

‘You mean the children crossed that road alone!’ Aunt Annabel demanded in a horrified voice. ‘But that nurse! Brigit, we must speak to her. How could she have let them do it?’

‘She wouldn’t have let them do it,’ Brigit said urgently. Her apprehension had not been without reason. Now it had flowered into this very real problem. ‘Something has happened to her. We’ve got to find out what it is.’

B
UT NO ONE COULD FIND
out anything. No one had seen Nurse Ellen leave the house. Her hat and coat and bag were gone, but no one had seen them on Nurse Ellen’s short plump brisk figure. They might have walked out of the house alone. It seemed that from the time she had left the children waiting while she assumedly went to fetch their coats Nurse Ellen had not been seen.

She had had to match wool, Brigit kept saying. Perhaps she had slipped over to Harrods before taking the children, and then, unable to match the wool there, had gone elsewhere. But she was not an irresponsible person. Had she done that she would have telephoned. It seemed that there could be only one explanation, and that was that she had had an accident.

By this time it was quite dark. Uncle Saunders had come home, and on being greeted with the news had exclaimed with lewd enjoyment, ‘There’s a man, of course. No woman ever disappears unless there’s a man in it. And that young woman didn’t look the spinster type.’

Brigit protested heatedly, ‘She wouldn’t just go off like that leaving all her clothes.’

‘What would she want with clothes?’

Aunt Annabel sighed in exasperation. ‘Saunders, do be serious! Apart from Nurse Ellen’s very odd disappearance here’s Brigit with no one to look after her. Something will have to be done.’

‘Don’t worry about Mrs Gaye,’ came Prissie’s soft eager voice. ‘I can look after her until another nurse can come.’

The thought of having to submit to Prissie’s ministrations was, to Brigit, the final exasperation. She felt she could not endure those white hands, childishly small and delicate, which had caressingly touched her possessions, now touching her body.

‘Why do you say “another nurse”?’ she asked sharply. ‘Why are you so sure Nurse Ellen won’t come back?’

The colour flew into Prissie’s cheeks. Her eyes looked strained and enormous. Brigit realized then that she was misjudging the girl. Her excitement about the turn of events was superficial. Beneath it she was alarmed and frightened. Her eyes, with their enlarged pupils, had almost the same look of repressed fear that Nicky’s had had.

‘The police must be informed,’ Aunt Annabel ventured nervously.

Uncle Saunders swung round on her. ‘I won’t have those damn useless police in my house again. They came to investigate a burglary and what have they done—nothing at all! No fingerprints, no clues. Just a waste of time. My goods have vanished and the insurance company will have to pay up. Police!’

He made an exclamation of disgust.

Brigit found herself longing desperately for Fergus. How could she, helpless in bed, manage a situation of this kind? Her eyes, moving restlessly round the room, caught sight of Nurse Ellen’s sewing, the needle stuck in a half-made stitch, as she had put it down on the chair by the window. It seemed, for one eerie moment, as if that vital cheery presence were in the room begging for help. Nurse Ellen wouldn’t just deliberately disappear. She must be in trouble somewhere.

‘I suggest,’ Brigit said, struggling for calm, ‘that someone ring the police and inquire if there has been an accident in this area. I think she must have been hurrying over to Harrods and been knocked down by a car. Probably she’s still unconscious. I can’t think of anything else.’

‘I’ll do that now,’ said Prissie with a return of her practical good sense. ‘We should have thought of it long ago.’ She turned at the door to look back. ‘If there hasn’t been an accident shall I report her disappearance?’

‘I think not until tomorrow,’ Brigit said slowly. ‘If she hasn’t had an accident she must be all right and—’

‘And she wouldn’t thank us for prying,’ Uncle Saunders finished jovially.

Brigit’s eyes returned to the sewing on the chair. Nurse Ellen sewed beautifully and took great pride in her work. If she had been deliberately going away she wouldn’t have left things about. Anyway, Uncle Saunders had the horrid diseased mind of all the Templars. One could not expect practical help from him.

Guy came presently, but he too was of little help. At first he looked alarmed, but when he heard that the immediate crisis had nothing to do with him or his complex affairs, he dismissed it lightly.

‘Nothing happens to a woman in broad daylight,’ he said. ‘She’ll turn up.’

Prissie came back to report that there had been no accidents in the Knightsbridge area that afternoon and Guy said, ‘Didn’t I tell you? Nurse Ellen can take care of herself.’

He took Prissie’s hand in a possessive way, and Brigit sadly realized that already he had forgotten the mystery of Nurse Ellen. He was still completely selfish.

There was always the hope, of course, that at any moment Nurse Ellen would walk in, with vociferous apologies for her absence. When, at ten o’clock, she had not done so Brigit was seriously alarmed. It was difficult to wait until morning before notifying the police, but perhaps Uncle Saunders was right and it was foolish to panic so quickly about a normal uncomplicated person like Nurse Ellen temporarily disappearing.

Prissie was the only one who was aware of her alarm. She was unexpectedly perceptive about it, and indeed seemed on the verge of tears. The colour had left her cheeks and her great dark eyes seemed to have grown. When her hand trembled as she handed Brigit her cup of hot chocolate, she laughed shakily and apologized.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve got the jitters. It’s just so queer Nurse Ellen vanishing like this. Do you think she was cross with me for not wanting her to take the children?’

‘I can’t think that would have worried her,’ Brigit said honestly.

‘Well, I don’t like anyone interfering with my job, and that’s true. But I didn’t expect this to happen.’

‘Prissie, it’s nothing to do with you. At least let’s be thankful the children are all right.’

‘Yes, there is that.’

Prissie bustled about tidying the room. ‘They seem to have had an enormously successful time just by themselves. Yes, Mrs Templar? Did you want me?’

Aunt Annabel was at the door saying that Prissie was wanted on the telephone. Brigit said at once, ‘Take it here, Prissie.’

For one moment Prissie stood as if poised for flight. Then, with the least perceptible reluctance, she came forward and picked up the white telephone by Brigit’s bedside.

With her back to the bed she said a guarded, ‘Yes, who is it?’ Then very quickly she went on, ‘I can’t discuss that now. We have some trouble here. I’m very busy. No, it isn’t serious, at least I hope not.’ Then suddenly and piteously she said, ‘I can’t—’ and stopped as if a hand had been clapped over her mouth. She listened a moment as the voice at the other end seemed to be saying something earnestly, then her head went up slightly, and she said in her normal voice, ‘Yes, I know you’re right. I’m so glad you’re feeling better. ’Bye, darling.’

She put down the telephone and turned to Brigit. She was smiling, with a return of her light-hearted gaiety, but Brigit had the queer feeling that it was gaiety superimposed on fear, that if one stripped it off there would show a terror as stark and inarticulate as Nicky’s for the mysterious Clementine.

‘That was Aunt Maud,’ she said. ‘She suddenly wanted to discuss an argument she is having with the people in the upstairs flat. Apparently it came to a climax this evening. I told her I just can’t be mixed up in them. I’m afraid Aunt Maud loves arguments. It’s so bad for her when she isn’t well. But apparently this one has done her good. She says she is feeling much better.’

Prissie was talking too much and too quickly. Brigit said:

‘You needn’t have been quite so abrupt with her, the poor soul.’

‘Oh, but I’ve told her she mustn’t ring me here. Honestly, you don’t know her. She’s incorrigible on the telephone. You literally have to hang up in her ear.’

Prissie’s voice, although it had its undertone of excitement, was quite self-assured again. That momentary desperation had left it. Could one garrulous old lady who liked to fight with her neighbours reduce her niece to desperation? Perhaps, in time, she could. But that was Prissie’s problem, and unrelated to the one that confronted them in this house tonight.

It was impossible to reconcile oneself to Nurse Ellen’s absence. Something very strange indeed must have happened.

But no one except Brigit and perhaps Prissie with her air of tension was going to worry a great deal about it. Uncle Saunders went stumping up to bed at his usual time, followed presently by Aunt Annabel. Guy, who had been playing records in the drawing-room, obviously hoping Prissie would go in, followed later. The house, apart from the sudden springs and pounces of the cats in the studio overhead settled to quiet.

It was Nicky who woke first. The witch doll in the cupboard was talking again. He knew that before the sound reached his ears, because he had woken in that familiar state of rigid fear. Something had woken him. It must have been the cackling voice of the doll.

He tried not to listen, but he knew that he would have to. Some awful fascination compelled him. Surely enough, presently the voice began again. It seemed very far away and it had a new tone tonight. Almost as if it were crying. ‘Let me out!’ it said. ‘Let me out!’

But that was a trick to make you get up and open the cupboard. And then out would come the horrid little black person with the beady eyes and clutching hands.

Oh, yes, she was being clever, saying, ‘Let me out!’ as if she were in desperate trouble. But it was a trick.

With a great effort of will Nicky moved his hands enough to pull the blankets over his head. That way, although it was hot and suffocating, he couldn’t hear the sad crying voice any more.

There was no voice in Brigit’s chimney tonight, not even a whisper of wind. But the silence, if anything, kept her awake. She kept worrying about Nurse Ellen’s completely unexplainable disappearance. Why, in between leaving this room and going to fetch the children, had she vanished? Certainly her hat and coat and bag had gone also, but everything else was here, even her sewing on the windowsill. She had told the children to wait until she got their coats. She had gone up to the second floor presumably to get the coats. No one, apparently, had seen her since. Had she come down the stairs again? Or was she concealed somewhere in the house?

Slowly, in her mind, Brigit, began to reconstruct Nurse Ellen’s probable movements. She would go into the bedroom where the children slept. Their coats would be in the big wardrobe in which Nicky declared the doll called Clementine was still hidden. She would reach in for them. Could she have stumbled and the door closed on her, locking her in? But then someone would have heard her calling for help.

And anyway Prissie had been up to ascertain whether or not the children had their coats. She would have opened the door to check on that. Nevertheless the feeling was growing in Brigit that the interval between telling the children to wait in the hall and going upstairs was the vital one.

Suddenly she thought, ‘If I were to trace her steps,’ and on an overwhelming impulse she sat up in bed, switched on the light, and threw back the blankets. Slowly, very slowly, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. Could she stand? With trembling hands she grasped the bedpost (surely no Spanish infanta had ever got so feebly and ignominiously out of this bed!) and gently let her weight go on to her feet. Her knees buckled ridiculously, but she did not fall. She could feel the chill of the polished floor on the soles of her feet. She could stand and feel!

Even as she was savouring this miracle, feet came shuffling rapidly along the passage and stopped at her door. Brigit, sinking on to the bed, saw Mrs Hatchett, a rotund figure in a pink flannel dressing-gown, standing uncertainly in the shadows.

‘Oh, madam, you’re awake,’ she said thankfully. ‘I’m that worried, I can’t sleep. It’s the noises.’

‘What noises?’ Brigit demanded sharply.

‘My ghost. No one else.’ Mrs Hatchett’s voice was a mixture of proprietary pride and anxiety. ‘He seems to have got shut in somewhere. He keeps calling “Let me out!” It’s never happened before. It’s downright heart-rending. I can’t stand it.’

‘What sort of a voice?’

‘Oh, high and wailing.’

‘A man’s?’

‘Well, it doesn’t sound like a man’s, I must say. But do ghosts have a sex? That’s one thing I’ve yet to find out. Why, madam, you’re all uncovered.’

‘I was too hot,’ Brigit said, impatient with the diversion. Her voice became urgent. ‘Mrs Hatchett, will you do something at once?’