Hand in Glove ra-22 Read online

  “In this matter I cannot agree with you.”

  “Bimbo’s been into it, too. He’s prepared to put up some of the cash and go in as a partner.”

  “Indeed. I am surprised to learn he is in a position to do so.”

  She actually changed colour at this. There was a short silence, and then she said: “Harold, I ask you very seriously to let Andrew have his inheritance.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You may remember,” she said, with no change of manner, “that when I do fight, it’s no holds barred.”

  “In common with most—”

  “Don’t say ‘with most of my delightful sex,’ Harold.”

  “One can always omit the adjective,” said Mr. Cartell.

  “Ah, well,” Désirée said pleasantly and stood up. “I can see there’s no future in sweet reasonableness. Are you enjoying life in P.P.’s stately cottage?”

  Mr. Cartell also rose. “It’s a satisfactory arrangement,” he said stiffly, “for me. I trust, for him.”

  “He won’t enjoy the Moppett-Leonard crise, will he? Poor P.P., such a darling as he is and such a Godalmighty snob. Does he know?”

  “Know what?” Mr. Cartell asked unguardedly.

  “About your niece and her burglar boyfriend?”

  Mr. Cartell turned scarlet and closed his eyes. “She is NOT,” he said in the trembling voice of extreme exasperation, “my niece.”

  “How do you know? I’ve always thought Connie might have popped her away to simmer, and then adopted her back, as you might say.”

  “That is a preposterous and possibly an actionable statement, Désirée. The girl — Mary Ralston — came from an extremely reputable adoption centre.”

  “Connie might have put her there.”

  “If you will forgive me, I’ll have a word with Noakes. I regret very much that I have troubled you.”

  “P.P. is dining with us. He and I are going to have a cozy old chum’s gossip before my treasure hunt party arrives.”

  Mr. Cartell said: “I am not susceptible to moral blackmail, Désirée. I shall not reconsider my decision about Andrew.”

  “Look,” Désirée said. “I fancy you know me well enough to realize that I’m not a sentimental woman.”

  “That,” said Mr. Cartell, “I fully concede. A woman who gives a large party on the day her brother’s death is announced—”

  “My dear Hal, you know you looked upon Ormsbury as a social scourge and so did I. By and large, I’m not madly fond of other people. But I am fond of Andrew. He’s my son and I like him very much indeed. You watch out for yourself, Harold. I’m on the warpath.”

  A motor horn sounded distantly. They both turned to the windows.

  “And here,” Désirée said, “are your friends. I expect you want to go to meet them. Good-bye.”

  When Mr. Cartell had left her, she moved into the French window and, unlike Moppett, very openly watched the scene outside.

  The Scorpion came up the drive at a great pace, but checked abruptly. Then it moved on at a more decorous speed and pulled up. Leonard and Moppett got out simultaneously. Sergeant Noakes advanced and so did they, all smiles and readiness, but with the faintest suggestion of self-consciousness, Désirée considered, in their joints. It’s people’s elbows, she reflected, that give them away.

  They approached the group of three. Moppett, with girlish insouciance, linked her arm through Mr. Cartell’s, causing him to become rigid with distaste.

  First blood to Moppett, thought Désirée with relish.

  Leonard listened to Sergeant Noakes with an expression that progressed from bonhomie through concern towards righteous astonishment. He bowed ironically and indicated the Scorpion. Catching sight of Désirée, he shook his head slowly from side to side as if inviting her to share his bewilderment. He then removed two large packages from the Scorpion.

  Désirée opened the French window and strolled down the steps towards them. Mr. Cartell furiously disengaged himself from Moppett.

  “I think,” he said, “that we should get back, Noakes. If Copper drives the other car, you, I suppose—”

  Sergeant Noakes glanced at Moppett and muttered something.

  “Don’t let us keep you,” Leonard said quickly and with excessive politeness. “Please.”

  They touched their hats to Désirée and mounted their respective cars. They drove away, inexplicably at a disadvantage.

  “Well,” Désirée asked cheerfully, “did you find my tiresome food?”

  Moppett and Leonard, all smiles, began to chatter and give way to each other.

  Finally Moppett said: “Dear Lady Bantling — yes. We’ve got it all, but, as you see, we ran into a muddle of sorts. Mr. Copper’s made a nonsense about the Scorpion, and we’ve missed buying it.”

  “Inefficient,” Leonard said. “It appears somebody else had first refusal.”

  “How very disappointing.”

  “Isn’t it!” Moppett agreed. “Too sickening.” She gave a little scream and put her hand to her mouth. “Leonard!” she cried. “Fools that we are!”

  “What, darling?”

  “We ought to have gone back with them. Look at us! Now what do we do?”

  Leonard allowed the slightest possible gap to occur before he said: “I’m afraid Mr. George Copper will have to make a return trip in my car. Too bad!”

  “What will you think of us?” Moppett asked Désirée.

  “Oh,” she said lightly, “the worst,” and they laughed with possibly a shade less conviction.

  “At least,” Moppett said, “we can bring the food in, can’t we? And if we might ring up for some sort of transport…”

  Bimbo came out of the house and fetched up short when he saw them. Désirée grinned at him.

  “Why not stay?” she said very distinctly to Moppett. “After fetching all our food, the least we can do is to ask you to eat it. Do stay.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Aftermath to a Party

  Andrew put Nicola’s overcoat on the seat and sat opposite to her.

  “The best thing about this train,” he said, “is that it’s nearly always empty. So you’re returning to the fold tomorrow, are you?”

  Nicola said Mr. Period had asked her to do so, and that was why she had left her typewriter behind.

  “But you’re not returning to Little Codling tomorrow,” Andrew said, with the air of taking a plunge, “you’re returning tonight. At least I hope so. Don’t say another word. I’ve got an invitation for you.”

  He produced it and gave it to her with an anxious smile.

  It was from his mother and it said:

  Do come to my dotty party tonight. Andrew will bring you and we’ll put you up. He’ll explain all about it, but do come.

  Nicola stared at him in amazement.

  “My mum,” he said, “has taken a fancy to you. So, as is no doubt abundantly obvious, have I. Now don’t go into a brouhaha and say you can’t. Just say: ‘Thank you, Andrew. How sweet of your mum, I’d love to.’ ”

  “But how can I?”

  “How?” Andrew said grandly. “Anyhow. Why not?”

  “I tell you what,” Nicola said. “You’ve nagged at your mum to ask me.”

  “I swear I haven’t. She nagged at me and I said I would if you would.”

  “There you are, you see.”

  “No, I don’t. And anyway, do stop carping and come. It’s definitely not one of my mama’s more rococo parties. I wouldn’t dream of taking you to one of them, of course.”

  Nicola, who remembered hearing rumours of some of Lady Bantling’s parties, felt relieved.

  “What I thought,” Andrew continued, “I’ll drop you wherever you live and you can nip into your Number One ceremonials and then I’ll pick up my dinner jacket. I have a car of sorts and we’ll dine somewhere and then we’ll drive down to Bayneshelme.”

  “What about the cocktail party you’re all dressed up for?”

  “Forget it, completely. Do come, N
icola. Will you?”

  “Thank you, Andrew. How sweet of your mum to ask me. I’d love to.”

  “Thank you, Nicola.”

  For the rest of the journey Andrew talked to Nicola about himself. He said he wanted to paint more than anything else in life and that he’d been having lessons and was “meant to be not too bad,” but bad or not he had to go on with it. He said that if he could take the Grantham Gallery over, there was a studio at the back where he could paint and manage the Gallery at the same time. Then he described his unproductive and bad-tempered meeting that morning with his guardian and stepfather, Mr. Cartell.

  “It was a snorter,” Andrew said thoughtfully. “He treated the whole thing as if it were a sort of adolescent whim. I’d brought down all the figures of the turnover and he wouldn’t look at them, damn him. I gave him the names of jolly good people who would supply an expert opinion, and he wouldn’t listen. All he would say was that my father wouldn’t have wanted me to resign my commission. What the hell,” Andrew shouted and then pulled himself up. “It’s not so much the practical side that infuriates me — I could, after all, I imagine, borrow the money and insure my life or whatever one does. It’s his bloody pontificating philistinism. What I believe I most resented,” he said, “was having to talk about my painting. I said things that are private to me and he came back at me with the sort of remarks that made them sound phony. Can you understand that?”

  “I think I can. And I suppose in the end you began to wonder if, after all, you were any good.”

  “You do understand, don’t you? Does everybody off-load their difficulties on you, or…No,” Andrew said, “I’d better not say that — yet. Thank you, anyway, for listening.”

  “Do you admire Agatha Troy’s painting?”

  He stared at her. “Well, of course. Why?”

  “I know her. She’s married to Roderick Alleyn in the C.I.D. I go there quite often. As a matter of fact, I’m paying them a visit tomorrow evening.”

  “What’s she like? I know what she looks like. Lovely bone. Kind of gallant. Is she alarming?”

  “Not at all. She’s rather shy. She’s jolly good about being interested in younger people’s work,” Nicola added. She hesitated and then said: “You may not care for the idea at all, but if you liked I could show her one of your things.”

  He turned very red and Nicola wondered if she had offended him.

  He said at last, “Do you know, I don’t think I’d dare.”

  “So Mr. Cartell really has downed you, I see.”

  “No, he hasn’t, you low-cunning girl.”

  “If you’d rather not I shan’t take umbrage. On the other hand I’ll be delighted if you say: ‘Thank you, Nicola. How sweet of you to ask me. I’d love to.’ ”

  Andrew grinned and for an appreciable interval was silent.

  “You win,” he said at last. “I’ll say that same small thing.”

  The rest of the journey passed quickly for both of them, and in London they followed the plan proposed by Andrew.

  At half past eight they were in his car on their way back into Kent. The night was warm for early April, the lights sailed past and there was a young moon in the sky. Nicola knew that she was beginning to fall in love.

  “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 thunderin
g 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.”