Ice in the Bedroom (12 page)

Sally had made a discovery.

'You do talk beautifully,' she said.

'I do, rather,' George agreed.

'And just like Freddie.'

'Better than Freddie, I should have said. Well, will you toddle off like a dear little soul and see if you can work Miss Yorke up to the five-bob standard. A woman of her eminence ought to be in the first three rows.'

Sally went upstairs and found Leila Yorke sipping tea and looking moody. Her air was that of one who is thinking of extra waiters.

'Did I hear the front door bell?' she asked.

'Yes, it was a caller.'

'Cornelius?'

'Not this time. It was Freddie's cousin George, the cop. He's selling tickets for the concert in aid of the Policemen's Orphanage.'

'Oh, a touch?'

'On a very modest scale. Ten bob will cover it, and you
will be supporting a charitable organization which is not only
most deserving in itself---'

'Oh, all right. Look in my bag. On the dressing table.'

Leila Yorke had spoken listlessly, but now she suddenly sat up and became animated.

'Did you say this bird was a policeman?'

'Complete with helmet and regulation boots. Why?'

'Wouldn't a policeman know all about private eyes?'

'Oh! You mean---?'

'To look for Joe. Go back and ask him if he can recommend somebody for the job.'

It was an idea, but to Sally's mind not a very good one.

'Do you think a private detective could do anything? I know they make enquiries and all that, but wouldn't it be rather like looking for a needle in a haystack?'

'Well, that's what private eyes are for. Go and ask him. I've got to find Joe, and this is the only way.'

'I suppose it is,' said Sally, and returned to the front steps, where George was standing like a large blue statue, thinking, apparently, of absolutely nothing, unless, of course, as it may well have been, his mind was on Miss Jennifer Tibbett. Tapped on the arm and hearing the words 'Hi, officer!', he came out of his coma and the light of hope flashed into his face.

'Any luck?'

'Two of the five-bob.'

'You're terrific! Was it a fearful struggle? Did you have to twist her arm?'

'Oh, no, she was a cheerful giver. Well, fairly cheerful. She's a bit down at the moment because she's lost her husband.'

George clicked his tongue, sympathetically.

'I say, rather a bad show, that. Enough to give any woman the pip. Not but what we've all of us got to go some time. What is it they say all flesh is as? Grass, isn't it?'

'Oh, he isn't dead, he's an extra waiter.'

'I'm not sure I quite got that. An extra what?'

Sally explained the position of affairs, and George said Oh, he saw now. For a moment, he added, he had not completely grasped the gist.

'And she asked me to ask you,' said Sally, 'if you knew any private eyes.'

'You mean shamuses?'

'That's right.'

'I don't, and I don't want to. Frightful bounders, all of them, from what I've heard. Always watching husbands and wives and trying to get the necessary evidence. We of the Force look down on them like anything. Does Miss Yorke want to scoop one in to try and find her husband?'

'That's the idea.'

'He'll have his work cut out for him.'

'So I told her.'

'He'll be looking for a needle in a haystack.'

'I said that, too.'

'Well, I wish I could help you. I'll tell you what I think her best plan would be. She ought to ask her solicitor.'

'Why, of course. A solicitor would probably know dozens of private detectives.'

'I think so. Solicitors always have oodles of shady work to be done - documents stolen from rival firms, heirs kidnapped, wills pinched and destroyed and so on. Trot along and put it up to her. And now, if you'll excuse me,' said George, 'I must be buzzing off on my official duties, or heaven knows what the denizens of Valley Fields will be getting up to in my absence. Awfully nice to have seen you.'

Sally returned to Leila Yorke, who had finished her breakfast and was enjoying one of her mild cigars.

'He says he doesn't know any private eyes, but he thinks a solicitor would.'

'I wonder.'

'It's worth trying.'

'I suppose so. All right, go and see Johnny Shoesmith.'

'Very well. I'd better wait till the afternoon. There are a lot of supplies to be got in, and if I'm not here to cook lunch for you, you'll try to do an omelette and make a frightful hash of it. Remember last time? I can't think why you never learned to cook. Didn't you have to get your own meals when you were a sob sister?'

'Me? You are speaking of the time when I was young and beautiful and men lined up in queues to feed me. Your Freddie's Uncle Rodney alone was good for six or seven dinners a week. And when I married, Joe did the cooking. He could cook anything, that boy. We had a little flat in Prince of Wales's Mansions, Battersea, and every night.’

A tear stole into Leila Yorke's eye, and Sally left the room hastily. Taking her shopping bag, she went out into Mulberry Grove and met George, who was emerging from the gate of Peacehaven. He had postponed his grappling with the criminal element of Valley Fields in order to return home and get his cigarettes, one—or possibly more - of which he hoped to be able to smoke when the sergeant's eye was not on him.

'Hullo,' he said. 'We meet again.'

'We do,' said Sally. 'I'm going shopping. Oh, by the way did you find your friend when you got back yesterday?'

George cocked an enquiring eye.

'What friend would that be?'

'I only caught a glimpse of her as I went by in the car. A tallish, fair girl. She was leaning on the gate of Peacehaven.'

George's face cleared.

'Oh, ah, yes. I know the girl you mean. I met her and we chatted of this and that. But she was a friend of Freddie's, not of mine. I had never seen her before in my life. Well, pip-pip once more,' said George, and with a courteous salute went on his way.

14

THE day which had turned out so well for Freddie's cousin George had proved less enjoyable for Mr. Shoesmith of Lincoln's Inn Fields. At breakfast a usually meticulous cook had served up to him boiled eggs which should have been taken from the saucepan at least a minute earlier and not content with this tort or misdemeanour had scorched the toast to the consistency of leather. At lunch at his club, the Demosthenes, he had been cornered by old Mr. Lucas-Gore, whose conversation was always a bleating melange of anecdotes about Henry James, an author in whom the solicitor's interest had never been anything but tepid. Towards the middle of the afternoon the weather had become close and oppressive, with thunder threatening. And at four o'clock Leila Yorke's secretary had appeared, babbling of private detectives.

A wholesome awe of Leila Yorke, bred in him from the days of his youth, had kept him from throwing the girl out on her ear, as he had wished to do, but he had got rid of her as quickly as possible, and scarcely had she gone when his daughter Myrtle arrived, interrupting him at a moment when he had hoped to be free to attend to the tangled affairs of Freddie's uncle, Lord Blicester, who was having his annual trouble with the income tax authorities. It was almost, Mr. Shoesmith felt, as if Providence were going out of its way to persecute him, and he was reminded of the case of Job, who had been the victim of a somewhat similar series of misfortunes.

Myrtle was not looking her sunniest. Her eyes smouldered, her lips were drawn in a tight line and her general aspect resembled that of the thunder-clouds which were banking up in the sky outside. She was a human replica of one of those V-shaped depressions extending over the greater part of the United Kingdom south of the Hebrides which are such a feature of the English summer, and Mr. Shoesmith gazed at her wanly. Knowing her moods, he could recognize the one now gripping her. She had a grievance, and experience had taught him that when she had a grievance, she sat and talked for hours, taking up time which could have been more profitably employed on lucrative work such as the tangled affairs of Lord Blicester. Wrenched from these, he felt like a dog deprived of a bone.

'Ah, Myrtle,' he said, resisting a temptation to strike his child with the Blicester dossier. 'Take a chair. Unpleasant weather. How is Alexander?'

He was not really interested in the health of his son-in-law, whose only merit in his eyes was his colossal wealth, but one must start a conversation somehow.

Myrtle, who had already taken a chair and looked to her father's anxious eyes as if she had glued herself to it, sat for a space breathing tempestuously through her nose. Her resemblance to a thundercloud had become more noticeable.

'Alexander is very upset.'

'I'm not surprised.'

'Why, have you heard?'

'Heard what?'

'About that Leila Yorke woman.' '

What about her?'

'So you haven't heard. Then why did you say you weren't surprised that Alexander is upset?'

What had led Mr. Shoesmith to do so had been his familiarity with Oofy's habit of starting the day with a morning hangover, but he felt that it would be injudicious and possibly dangerous to put this into words. He replied that he was aware how delicate his son-in-law's digestion was.

'Eaten something that disagreed with him?' he asked with as much sympathy as he could muster, which was not a great deal.

Myrtle's breathing took on a snorting sound.

'My dear father, you don't suppose I came all this way to talk about Alexander's digestion. He's upset about this frightful business of Leila Yorke. I think she must have gone off her head. You know Alexander owns the majority stock in Popgood and Grooly, who publish her books?'

'Yes, you told me. A very sound firm, from all I hear.
Bessie alone---'

'Who is Bessie?'

Mr. Shoesmith assumed the manner which Freddie Widgeon disliked so much, his dry, put-you-in-your-place manner.

'An old friend of mine who writes under the pseudonym of Leila Yorke. She was Bessie Binns when I first knew her, and it is pardonable of me, I think, to refer to her by her real name. But if you would prefer that I do not do so, your wishes are law. I was about to say when you interrupted me - we were speaking, if you remember, of the financial stability of the publishing house of Popgood and Grooly - that Leila Yorke alone must be worth a good many thousands of pounds to them annually.'

A curious sound which might have been a hollow laugh escaped Myrtle.

'Yes, because up to now she has written the sort of---'

She hesitated for a word.

'Bilge?' suggested Mr. Shoesmith.

'If you like to put it that way. I was going to say the sort of horrible sentimental stuff that appeals to women. There isn't an author in England who has a bigger library public. Women worship her.'

Mr. Shoesmith cackled like a hen, his way of chuckling.

'I wonder what they would think of her if they met her. She certainly isn't like her work. But why do you say "up to now"?'

'Because she's planning to do something quite different with her next book. Her secretary called on Mr. Grooly yesterday and told him that the novel she's working on now is going to be grey and stark and grim, like George Gissing.’

'A fine writer.'

'I dare say; but he didn't sell. Imagine the effect this will have on her public. She'll lose every reader she's got.'

'So that is why Alexander is upset?'

'Isn't it natural that he should be? It means thousands of pounds out of his pocket. I was in the room when Mr. Grooly telephoned to tell him the news, and he turned ashy pale.'

An improvement, Mr. Shoesmith thought. He had never admired his son-in-law's complexion. Owing to a too pronounced fondness for champagne, Oofy had always been redder than the rose, and Mr. Shoesmith preferred the male cheek to be more damask.

'Has she written the book?' he asked.

'She's thinking it out. She has gone down to the suburbs to get local colour.'

'It may turn out to be very good.'

'But it won't be Leila Yorke. Can't you understand? When people see the name Leila Yorke on a novel, they expect Leila Yorke stuff, and if they don't get it, they drop her like a hot coal. How would you like it if you bought a book you thought was about company law and found it was a murder mvsterv?'

'I'd love it,' said Mr. Shoesmith frankly.

'Well, Leila Yorke's public won't. This book will kill her stone dead. She won't have a reader left.'

'I don't suppose she cares. She's been making twenty thousand pounds a year for the last fifteen years and saving most of it. It seems to me it's entirely her own affair if she spurns Popgood and Grooly's gold and decides to go in for art for art's sake. I don't understand the Popgood and Grooly agitation. If they don't want to publish the thing, they don't have to.'

'But they do. She's got a contract for six more books.'

'Then what on earth do you expect me to do?' said Mr.
Shoesmith, trying not to speak petulantly but missing his
objective by a wide margin. The conflict between Lord Blicester and the income tax authorities presented several points
of nice legal interest, and he was longing to get back to them.
Not for the first time he was regretting that his daughter had
not married someone with a job out in, say, the Federated
Malay States, where leave to come to England is given only
about once every five years. If she has a contract---'

Myrtle was fumbling in her bag.

'I've brought it with me. I thought you might be able to find something in it which would prevent her doing this insane thing.'

‘I doubt it,' said Mr. Shoesmith, taking the document. He skimmed through it with a practised eye and handed it back. 'I thought so. Not a word even remotely specifying any particular type of book.'

'But isn't it implied?'

'Isn't what implied?'

'That she's got to do the sort of thing she has always done.’

'Certainly not. You don't imply conditions in contracts, you state them in black and white.’

'Do you mean to say that if Agatha Christie had a contract
with her publisher---'