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  She was not looking at her visitor but she was aware of her stiffening. The deer was emerging, she thought, timid and curious at the forest’s edge. She ventured to be more explicit.

  “I was never out of love myself after I was twelve,” she announced cheerfully. “At fifteen I nearly died of it. He came to the local theatre for a week and he looked so neglected, with his green tights runkled round his ankles, that I cried whenever I thought of it. On the Friday he came into our bar and I saw that he had a great blue nose and was sixty if he was a day. Even that didn’t quite put me off.”

  She was still looking at the fireplace and not wholly laughing.

  “I thought that if he would only notice me I could cure him, you know,” she added devastatingly.

  Her audience exploded. “There were girls like that at school,” she said. “What happens to them? Do they ever get over it?”

  “I don’t know.” Polly looked so lugubrious that they both laughed and Annabelle gave in.

  “I’ve been in love myself,” she said primly, “but not as bad as that.”

  “Ah.” Polly pounced on the admission. “Who? The parson, perhaps?”

  “Good heavens no. He’s got grandchildren and makes sheep’s noises in church.”

  “Not mistresses at school?”

  “No. They don’t count.” It became evident that Annabelle was thinking round for a suitable candidate. “There’s Richard, of course.”

  “Not nearly good enough!” Mrs. Tassie succeeded in checking the words in time. She made a sincere effort to be reasonable.

  “And who is Richard?”

  Her visitor was ready to chatter. After a careful biographical sketch, a minute physical description, and a somewhat arbitrary delineation of character, she came to the heart of the matter.

  “When he was in love with Jenny I was breathlessly keen on him,” she admitted, looking so like a Greuze that Polly was startled. “But I was young then, and nobody suspected. I did feel it terribly, though. I thought he was the only person in the world and that I’d lost him. Then he went into the army and I forgot him and I didn’t see him again until this morning.”

  “Really?”

  “I asked him to meet me, you see, because I’d never been alone in London before. Naturally I was rather interested but when he arrived he was only an ordinary boy. Quite a nice one. I’ll have to look him up, by the way. Will that be all right?”

  “We’ll invite him on Sunday.” Polly tried not to sound as if she was preparing for an enemy. “What do you like about him? Do you know?”

  Annabelle considered earnestly, seeking for the exact truth no doubt.

  “The back of his neck, I think,” she admitted at last.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Tassie. She paused and added, “Twenty-two, you say? And in Tea?”

  “You said that as if it meant three feet high and half-witted. He’s not terribly tall, as a matter of fact, but he moves awfully well.”

  “Well, we’ll see.” Polly was irritated with herself for feeling irritated. “You’ve never thought you’d like to marry someone older and more exciting … more difficult?”

  To her horror the innocent eyes turned towards her with the awful seriousness of an intelligent baby.

  “Oh.” The tone told her nothing. “Someone like that fair man who stopped the siren for me this morning?”

  There was a brief and startled silence during which the older woman’s cheeks grew slowly red. She opened her mouth to speak but was saved, literally, by the bell. A distinctive buzz from the front door surprised them both.

  “Who on earth is that?”

  Annabelle rose at once. “I’ll go and see.” Her pink mouth widened uncontrollably and her eyes narrowed with mischief. “Suitors perhaps, Aunt Polly.”

  Chapter 9

  THE VISITORS

  POLLY STOOD IN the studio in the garden, a bright neat figure surrounded by all her formidable junk. She was smiling at Charlie Luke engagingly.

  “What do you want?” she demanded unexpectedly. “I’ve shown you all Freddy’s old rubbish and I’ve told you there’s nothing else like it in the house, and yet here you are growing more and more depressed while I watch you. What’s the matter?”

  Luke’s dark face with its strong nose and narrow dancing eyes split into a smile.

  “I’m ungrateful,” he agreed. “That’s right. It’s a staggering show. Your husband must have been …” he hesitated.

  “Very fond of it,” she said firmly. “You don’t want to shut it, do you? It’s not doing any harm.”

  “None in the world.” He looked round once more, a spark of laughter in his eyes. “It’s old fashioned, out of the ordinary and highly educational. No, I don’t want to shut it.”

  She sighed with relief and her glance travelled down the room to where Mr. Campion and Annabelle were enjoying the usual first conversation among people of their kind, an exploratory expedition part genealogical, part geographical, concerning mutual friends in the country. Polly was glad the child was there to take the pale affable stranger out of her way. Luke belonged to a type who was more to her taste.

  “Well then, what is it?” As she spoke she touched his sleeve and was aware of the steel muscle beneath it. He was treating her, too, with the direct knowing intelligence which she had always liked in a man.

  “I was looking for some waxworks,” he said, turning to her.

  “Looking for them?” He did not quite understand the nuance in her tone, but her face was placid enough. “What a pity,” she added sincerely. “I had two, but they’ve gone. They were in that case there.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Oh, they were here last winter. They were thrown out at spring-cleaning. Why?”

  Luke did not reply immediately. He had known in his bones that Picot and Bullard were going to be right, the moment he had put his nose in the hall. His secret hope had been that the waxworks were going to turn out to be nothing at all like the waiter’s description, so that the tea-shop theory could be raised again, but as soon as he saw the empty seat in the glass case his heart misgave him. He knew that three of the flags on his map would have to come down.

  He took a packet of frayed papers out of his pocket and consulted the original description which he already knew by heart.

  “Can you remember these things Mrs. Tassie?”

  “Of course I can. We had them for years. An old man and an old woman in Victorian costume.”

  “Fancy-dress?” His eagerness puzzled her yet set her mind at rest. At any rate he did not seem to be worrying about what had happened to them. She did not want to have to tell a lie.

  “I couldn’t call it fancy-dress, exactly. The clothes were old fashioned, but you could have gone out in the street in them. The old lady had a red dress and a shepherd’s plaid stole and a round bonnet in black silk which had gone a bit brown, but it had lovely beads on it just like the newest idea.”

  “What colour were they?”

  “Oh, black.” She spoke with complete authority and the Superintendent did not look up.

  “What about the man?”

  “Well, he was the real trouble.” She appeared embarrassed. “He was dropping to bits. His head was respectable because long ago, when his long beard got awful, Freddy had him out and cut it into a tidy round, and he had his hard hat cleaned and reblocked at the same time. But last year I noticed that the suit really had gone. It was black turned green and the moth had got it. I half wondered if I ought to put him in a pair of Freddy’s trousers but I couldn’t bring myself to. It seemed so shocking. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I do.” Luke put away his packet of notes and sighed. He was bitterly disappointed. The description tallied. The witness had made a silly but commonplace mistake. “I do. Once the moth appears, far better to chuck the lot out. Well, Ma’am, thank for your information.”

  Polly wavered. Her eyes were anxious and she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

  “O
ught you to have seen them? Was it important? Does it matter that they’ve gone?”

  Luke smiled at her. The police have a technique with the useful but not unnaturally inquisitive householder.

  “No,” he said cheerfully. “It was a question of satisfying my own mind. People who give evidence sometimes make mistakes. A chap who sees some people we’re interested in—through the window of a ’bus, for instance—can be reminded subconsciously of somebody else, say an actress on the screen. So when he comes to make his deposition to us he gives us all sorts of details, clothes, expression, everything. But the person he’s describing may be the woman on the screen, not the one whom he only saw for a moment in the ’bus. It’s a thing we have to look out for all the time.”

  “I see,” she said gravely. “And you thought something like that had happened with my waxworks? Were you right?”

  “I’m afraid we were,” he admitted, grimacing at her. “Our witness must have come in here one day when they were here. He made the mistake quite innocently. They always do.”

  Polly shook her head. “It means all your work is wasted, I suppose?” She sounded as worried all of a sudden as he felt, he reflected wryly.

  “It happens.”

  “Oh, I know.” She was deeply sympathetic. “When we had our hotel Freddy and I had a very good friend, County Superintendent Gooch. He’d be quite twenty years older than you and it was up north so I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him, but he told me that police work was like growing seed. For every quarter ounce you got you had to sift a bushel of chaff.”

  “Ah, he was a member all right!” Luke’s heart went out to the northern practitioner and the old woman smiled at his warmth.

  “Dick Gooch was a kind man,” she remarked. “He taught me one or two very useful little hints, I remember.”

  Luke’s quick eyes met her own inquisitively. He liked her, she was his sort, he reflected.

  “Such as what?” he murmured. “The tidy dose of chloral in a rowdy’s half-pint?”

  Polly’s brows rose into croquet hoops.

  “Shush. That’s not a thing to mention even in fun.” She spoilt the effect immediately by adding in a lower tone, “It’s a very useful thing to know, though, if a woman does happen to be left alone in charge of licensed premises at any time. They sleep very peacefully and nobody is any the wiser.”

  Luke controlled a shout of laughter. She was restoring his temper.

  “Did you ever have to use it, Ma’am?”

  “Certainly not, Superintendent,” said she and they both laughed, and, turning away from the empty showcase, made a move to join the other two.

  Annabelle was talking, her country colour glowing, her face animated. Charlie Luke leaned towards his new friend.

  “You’ve got a knock-out there, Ma’am, if I may say so. Your niece, or your husband’s?”

  He expected her to be delighted and she was.

  “Oh, Freddy’s,” she whispered back. “Such a nice child, too. Not in the least conceited. I’ve only known her for a day, but I love her already.”

  “A day?” He paused to stare at her. She was not looking at him but continued placidly.

  “I invited the elder sister but she couldn’t be spared, so they sent this one. Only this morning. But she’s very like Freddy. The same temperament and the same common-sense. He and I got on like a house on fire from the moment we met. Some people make friends like that. They do or they don’t in the first ten minutes.”

  Luke grinned. He found her soothing. She restored his self-confidence.

  “And you’re one of the ones,” he suggested.

  She beamed at him. “And so are you,” she declared, startling him, “and it’s a very funny thing to find in a policeman. It must be very awkward at times. Still, you’re tough and I suppose you can take it. Now is it too early for a drink, or can I offer you some tea?”

  They had just reached the others and Luke shook his head. Annabelle was full of news.

  “Mr. Campion’s wife is Amanda Fitton, Aunt Polly,” she announced. “We know her sister at home. She lives in almost the next village. And you,” she added joyfully, turning to Luke, “you must be the man who married Prunella last year. Will you give her my regards, please? She’ll remember me, Annabelle Tassie.”

  “Only last year?” Polly pounced on the information and regarded the Superintendent with a new and to him terrifying enlightment. She closed her lips at once but as she let her visitors out of the garden door she shook his hand and wished him good luck very earnestly, so that he had no doubt at all to what she referred. She made him laugh even while she embarrassed him, a human old party if ever he saw one.

  Mr. Campion did not follow Luke immediately but lingered for a moment or two chatting to Annabelle. He was dithering slightly in the way which those who had cause to know him best might have found a little sinister. His pale face was as vacuous as in his youth and his eyes were lazy behind their spectacles.

  “It’s such a jolly neighbourhood, don’t you think?” he was saying earnestly as he waved an idle hand which took in the hideous studio behind them and the so-far unrestored tenement house opposite.

  “Jolly?” Annabelle, who was literal minded, sounded dubious, and Polly, her smile still happy from her encounter with Luke, sailed in to the rescue.

  “It’s been good in its time,” she agreed, “and people are re-discovering it and painting it up, which is always exciting.”

  “Of course it is. And so convenient. So near the shops.”

  It was Polly’s turn to be astonished. To her mind, the hardware shops at the Barrow Road corner of Edge Street were hardly the kind to attract him.

  “Well, I find them useful,” she said, “naturally. But they’re not very posh. One would hardly buy clothes here, or …”

  “Oh I say, wouldn’t you? Not some things? I mean to say …” The stranger appeared to be wrestling with the conversational subject as if it was a wet sheet which had fallen on him. “I understand there’s a magnificent store somewhere down here called Cuppage’s, famous for its sales and for men’s gloves. Is that true? Have you ever bought men’s gloves in a sale at Cuppage’s, Mrs. Tassie? As a present, I mean, not—not to wear of course. S—silly of me.”

  The involved stuttering speech was sufficiently long to permit the words to register and Polly stood stiffly, her head slightly on one side and her indulgent smile fading. From behind his spectacles Mr. Campion observed her with interest and saw first astonishment and then incredulity, followed by a flicker of instantly suppressed alarm, appear and vanish on her kindly face. When she bade him goodbye she was on guard.

  Luke had waited a yard or two down the street for him and now they walked toward the corner together to pick up the police car which had been parked discreetly just around it. Luke seemed disposed to apologise, if strictly in his own way.

  “I’m Charlie Muggins in person,” he remarked. “I know it and I don’t want to hear any more about it. Wherever the Goff’s Place Beauty is, he’s not in that chamber of horrors. That’s one item we can enter in the book and sign for.”

  “You think so?”

  “Don’t you?” Something in the light voice had made Luke turn to stare, his arched brows rising high. “That old girl was on the up and up, and the dummies she described were clearly wearing the clothes which our witness had in mind.”

  “Oh yes, I agree.” Mr. Campion conveyed that those were not quite the lines on which he was thinking. “A pleasant woman,” he continued cautiously, “but with one peculiarity which might be significant in the circumstances, or so I thought, didn’t you?”

  “No,” said Charlie Luke, who was irritated with himself. “Since you ask me, chum, no. I’m satisfied that I’ve been led up Garden Green as far as Goff’s Place is concerned. I admit it and when I get back I may possibly go in and tell old Yeo so, just to see his happy smile. You can take it from me that there isn’t anything that isn’t dead ordinary about that woman. The world is packed
with old ducks just like her. There’s millions of ’em, all born on a Friday, loving and giving. What’s peculiar about Aunt Polly, for God’s sake?”

  Mr. Campion hesitated. “I was thinking of her museum,” he said. “To keep up a nuisance of a place like that, which she doesn’t think is funny, as a memorial to a man who was delighted with it, argues that she loved him in a particular way. She identified herself with him.”

  “Okay.” Luke was splendidly unimpressed. “There’s no need to get a trick-cyclist approach to that one. That’s how uncomplicated people do love. They gang up. I’m you, you’re me, that’s the big idea, so what?”

  “So where is the rest of the family?” said Mr. Campion simply.

  It was a convincing point. Luke pushed his hat on to the back of his head and walked along considering.

  “She’s bound to have someone to be fond of, I grant you that,” he said at last, “or she wouldn’t be standing up. The girl has only been there a day so it can’t be her. The old lady must have friends, obviously. You think she’s mothering something, do you?”

  “I don’t know at all.” The thin man shrugged his shoulders. “No one’s living in the house. She may have many interests. I got the impression that there were several people in and out didn’t you?”

  Luke frowned. “A coke hod in the kitchen was standing on an old copy of Sports Motor and there was a cigar butt among the London Pride edging the little path to the front door. There was an overall too big for her hanging in the scullery, and someone had left a bunch of watercress on the kitchen window-ledge,” he recited casually. “Yes, of course there are people about her or she wouldn’t be as she is, but no, Campion, our chap can’t be amongst them. The witness who saw the old folk in the ’bus happened to confuse them with the waxworks in her museum. That’s sufficient. If the murderer was known to her as well, the coincidence would be amazing.”