Ice in the Bedroom (16 page)

He stilled his vibrating moustache with a quick hand, and leaned forward - impressively, he hoped, though actually the impression he gave Leila Yorke was that he was about to have some sort of fit.

'Has it occurred to you, madam, that the person who inserted these advertisements may have been trying to force you to leave Castlewood because there is something there he wants to secure and will be able to secure if the house becomes unoccupied?'

Leila Yorke considered the suggestion, and after the briefest of moments placed it in the class of those she did not think much of. No doubt England's criminals included in their ranks a certain number of eccentrics, but she refused to believe that even these would go to so much trouble to obtain an aspidistra, a reproduction of Millais' Huguenot and a china mug with 'A Present From Bognor Regis' on it in pink sea shells.

'What on earth is there in Castlewood for anyone to want?' she demanded.

'Possibly the object is buried in the garden.'

'Not a bone, or those dogs would have got it.'

Chimp's expression, though not losing the respectfulness due to a client, showed that he deplored this frivolity. His manner became more portentous, his diction more orotund.

'If I am right in supposing there is something of value concealed on the premises, it is to be presumed that it was placed there by some recent occupant of the house. It would be interesting to find out who was the tenant of Castlewood before you.'

'I know that. Cornelius told me. It was someone called Molloy.'

Chimp started dramatically.

'Molloy?'

'So Cornelius said.'

'An American?’

'Yes.'

'A large man with a high forehead?'

'I don't know. I never saw him,' said Leila Yorke, unaware that she had had that pleasure and privilege. 'Why?'

'I am wondering if it can have been a dangerous crook known as Soapy Molloy. Who, by the way, is Cornelius?'

'The house agent.'

'With your permission I will call him up. This cannot be a mere coincidence,' said Chimp, rummaging in a drawer for the telephone book. 'The name Molloy, and all these strange, one might say sinister, happenings. Suspicious, very suspicious. Mr. Cornelius?' he said. 'This is the J. Sheringham Adair detective agency. We have been asked by Scotland Yard to assist them with some questions regarding a man named Molloy, who occupied a house called Castlewood until recently. Scotland Yard thinks this may be the same Molloy in whom they are interested. Could you describe him to me?...I see…Yes…Yes…thank you.' He hung up, and turned to Leila Yorke with an air of quiet triumph 'It is the same man, not a doubt of it.'

'But who is he?' asked Leila Yorke, impressed. There had been a period since she entered this office when its dustiness and dinginess had shaken her faith in its proprietor, but it was now quite solid again. What is a little dust, she was feeling, if the head it settles on contains a keen, incisive brain?

Chimp fondled his moustache.

'Soapy Molloy, though nothing has as yet been proved against him, nothing that would stand up in court, is known to be the head of an international drug ring which the police have been trying to smash for years, and I think we may take it as certain that he has buried a large consignment of the dope in the garden of Castlewood. No other explanation seems to meet the case. You must leave the house immediately, madam.'

Leila Yorke's jaw tightened, and her blue eyes glowed with an offended light.

'What, let myself be chased out of my home by a dope peddler?'

Chimp hastened to soothe her wounded pride.

'It is merely a ruse. Thinking the house is unoccupied, Molloy will act. But it will not be unoccupied. I shall be there.'

'You?’

'What I suggest is this. You return to your home in Sussex tonight and tell this Mr. Cornelius that you are leaving. Molloy is certain to get in touch with him tomorrow or the day after to find out if his efforts to get rid of you have been successful. He will come to Castlewood, thinking the coast is clear, and I shall be waiting for him.'

'You'd better borrow my shot-gun.'

'Unnecessary. I shall have some of my best men with me--- Meredith certainly and possibly Schwed. Three of us will be enough to overpower this scoundrel.'

'I thought Meredith and Schwed were looking for my husband.'

'I shall take them off the case, but only for a few hours. I am expecting Molloy to make his move tomorrow night. We must oblige Scotland Yard.'

'Why? I'm not worrying about Scotland Yard's troubles. I want to find Joe.'

'We shall find him, madam. The Sheringham Agency never fails. You will leave Castlewood tonight?'

'I suppose so, if you say so.'

Then that is settled. You will telephone me directly you are leaving?'

'Very well.'

'And what did you say your address in the country was?'

'Claines Hall, Loose Chippings.'

‘I’ll send my bill to you there,' said Chimp, and having ushered his client to the door with a suavity of which those who knew him best would never have thought him capable opened another drawer of the desk and produced the bottle of whisky without which, as is generally known, no detective agency can function. As he drank, a glow suffused him, due partly to the generous strength of the spirit but even more to the thought that he was about to slip a quick one over on the Mrs. Thomas G. Molloy, who in the past had so often slipped quick ones over him.

Leila Yorke, meanwhile, had groped her way out of the twilight dimness of Halsey Court and wandered into Bond Street to do a little window-shopping before lunch. She was thus enabled to encounter Freddie Widgeon, who was on his way to enjoy, if it could be called enjoying, the hospitality of his uncle, Lord Blicester. An invitation, equivalent to a royal command, had reached him on the previous day.

Leila Yorke was delighted to see Freddie. She had been contemplating a solitary meal, and she disliked solitary meals.

'Hullo there, Widgeon,' she said. 'The hour has produced just the man I wanted.'

Her interview with Chimp Twist had left her in excellent spirits. The prospect of getting away from Valley Fields, shocking as this would have seemed to Mr. Cornelius, elated her. She wanted to be back at Claines Hall, Loose Chippings, at her familiar desk, writing the same old tripe she had always written, and no more of this nonsense of being stark and grey and significant. It amazed her that she had ever dreamt of trying to top that gloomy historian of the suburbs, the late George Gissing. Even as she gazed into the jeweller's window, there had come into her head the germ of an idea for a story about a man named Claude and a girl called Jessamine who had grey eyes and hair the colour of ripe wheat.

'Oh, hullo,' said Freddie. He seemed to her distrait and out of tune with her joyous mood. 'How have you been lately? Bobbing along? My cousin George tells me you've been having cat trouble.'

'A spot,' said Leila Yorke buoyantly, 'the merest spot. I'll tell you all about it while you're giving me lunch.'

'Frightfully sorry, but I can't give you lunch. I'm fixed up with my uncle Rodney.'

'Where?'

'Barribault's.'

'I'll join you,' said Leila Yorke.

18

CATERING
as it does mainly for Texas millionaires who have just learned that another oil well has been discovered on their property and maharajahs glad to have got away from the pomp and ceremony of the old palace for a while, there is always an atmosphere of hearty - though never unrefined - gaiety about the lobby of Barribault's Hotel at the luncheon hour, and it was an atmosphere that fitted well with Leila Yorke's mood. Freed from the cloying society of the Castle-wood cats and stimulated by her recent interview with J. Sheringham Adair, she had recovered all her normal exuberance. The dullest eye could discern that she was in the pink. Far too much so, Freddie considered, as he eyed her morosely. Wanting to be alone to brood on his grief, preferably in some cemetery, he found her vivacity hard to bear.

'Widgeon,' she said, raising her glass and beaming with good-will, 'I would like you to join me in a toast, and no heel-taps. To the fellow who first invented life, for he started a darned good thing. What did you say?'

Freddie, who had said 'Oh?', said he had said 'Oh?', and she proceeded.

'You see before you. Widgeon, a woman who, if such goings-on were allowed in this posh caravanserai, would be clapping her  ands in glee and dancing around on the tips of her toes.'

'Oh?' said Freddie.

'Today, and you may give this to the Press, I am glad, glad, glad, like Polyanna, and with good reason. I have seen the light and realize what a mug's game it was ever to think of writing that stark novel of squalor I spoke to you about. I have abandoned the idea in toto.’

'Oh?' said Freddie.

There rose before me the vision of all those thousands of half-witted women waiting with their tongues out for their next ration of predigested pap from my pen, and I felt it would be cruel to disappoint them. Be humane, I told myself. Who am I to deprive them of their simple pleasures, I soliloquized. Keep faith with your public, my girl, I added, still soliloquizing.'

'Oh?' said Freddie.

'And there was another aspect of the matter. Inasmuch as these blighted novels of squalor have to be at least six hundred pages long, hammering one out would have been the most ghastly sweat, and the first lesson an author must learn is to make things as easy for himself as possible. The ideal toward which one strives is unconscious cerebration. I look forward to a not distant date when I shall be able to turn out the stuff in my sleep.'

'Oh?' said Freddie.

She gave him a sharp glance. Though preferring always to bear the major burden of any conversation in which she took part, she liked more give-and-take than this. A little onesided this exchange of ideas was becoming, she felt.

'Aren't you saying "Oh?" a good deal as of even date?' she said. 'You seem distrait. Widgeon.'

'I am a bit.'

'What's eating you?'

Freddie laughed a mirthless laugh, the sort of laugh a lost soul in an Inferno might have uttered, if tickled by some observation on the part of another lost soul.

'What isn't?'

'Hard morning at the office?'

'Well, I got fired, if you call that hard.'

Leila Yorke was all warm-hearted sympathy.

'My poor unhappy boy! What was the trouble?'

'Oh, nothing you'd understand. Technical stuff. I made a bloomer yesterday when copying out an affidavit, as the foul things are called, and when I arrived this morning - late again, because I'd been hanging round trying to get a word with Sally - Shoesmith sent for me and applied the boot. He said he had felt the urge for a long time and had struggled to fight against it, but this had made it irresistible. He gave me a month's salary in lieu of notice, saying it was well worth the money to get rid of me immediately. He added that this was the happiest day of his life.'

'Didn't you plead with him?'

'Certainly not. I ticked him off. Remembering what you had told me about his murky past, I said that I might not be his dream employee, but at least I didn't kiss girls behind rhododendron bushes. Oddly enough, I never have. Rose bushes, yes, but not rhododendrons. "Kiss fewer girls behind rhododendron bushes, Shoesmith," I said, and I turned on my heel and walked out.'

'Very upsetting. I don't wonder you're feeling off your oats.'

'Oh, it isn't that. Being fired doesn't worry me, because pretty soon I shall be making a vast fortune.'

'How's that?'

'Sorry, I can't tell you,' said Freddie, remembering Mr. Molloy's injunctions of secrecy. 'It's just an investment of sorts I'm going to clean up on. No, what I'm down among the wines and spirits about,' he went on, abandoning reserve in his desire to unburden himself to a sympathetic confidant, 'is Sally. Has she told you what happened?'

'Not a word. What did happen?'

Freddie dipped his finger in his empty glass, secured the olive and swallowed it with a moody gulp.

'If something's gone wrong between you and Sally, you need another of those,' said Leila Yorke maternally.

'You think so?'

'I'm sure of it. Waiter! Encore de Martini cocktails. Talking of waiters,' she said, as the man withdrew, 'my missing husband's one.'

'You don't say?'

'Saw him with my own eyes flitting to and fro with the hashed chicken in pastry at the Pen and Ink Club luncheon. But don't let's get off on the subject of my affairs. Everything's going to be all right as far as I'm concerned. I have an octopus stretching its tentacles hither and thither in search of him, and you know what these octopi are like. They never fail. Forget me and tell me about you and Sally. Have you really parted brass rags?'

'It looks like it.'

'What did you do to the girl?'

'I didn't do anything.'

'Come, come!'

'It was my cousin George.'

'The zealous officer who got into my ribs for ten of the best the other day for concert tickets? How does he come into it?'

Freddie scowled darkly at an inoffensive Texas millionaire who had seated himself at a near-by table. He had nothing specific against the man, but he was in the mood to scowl at anyone who came within his orbit of vision, and would have looked equally blackly at a visiting maharajah. When a Widgeon has lost the woman he loves, the general public is well advised to keep at a safe distance.

'I must begin by saying,' he began by saying, 'that of all the fatheaded, clothheaded half-wits that ever blew a police whistle, my cousin George is the worst. He's like that fellow in the poem whose name led all the rest.'

'I know the fellow you mean. Had a spot of bother with angels getting into his bedroom in the small hours, if I remember rightly. So George is fatheaded, is he?'

'Has been from birth. But on this occasion he lowered all previous records. Oh, I know he has some sort of a story in…What's that word beginning with an "X"? It's on the tip of my tongue.'

'Xylophone?'