“Yes, but what’s he got to do with blackmail?”
“Nothing. He is, as you say, an extremely nice little man.”
“Roderick, don’t be infuriating. Has Bunchy Gospell got anything to do with Scotland Yard?”
Alleyn was staring out into the garden.
“You might say,” he said at last, “that we have a very great respect for him at the Yard. Not only is he charming — he is also, in his own way, a rather remarkable personage.”
Lady Alleyn looked at her son meditatively for some seconds.
“Are you meeting him today?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Why?”
“Why, darling, to listen to one of his famous stories, I suppose.”
It was Miss Harris’s first day in her new job. She was secretary to Lady Carrados and had been engaged for the London season. Miss Harris knew quite well what this meant. It was not, in a secretarial sense, by any means her first season. She was a competent young woman, almost frighteningly unimaginative, with a brain that was divided into neat pigeon-holes, and a mind that might be said to label all questions ‘answered’ or ‘unanswered’. If a speculative or unconventional idea came Miss Harris’s way, it was promptly dealt with or promptly shut up in a dark pigeon-hole and never taken out again. If Miss Harris had not been able to answer it immediately, it was unanswerable and therefore of no importance. Owing perhaps to her intensive training as a member of the large family of a Buckinghamshire clergyman she never for a moment asked herself why she should go through life organising fun for other people and having comparatively little herself. That would have seemed to Miss Harris an irrelevant and rather stupid speculation. One’s job was a collection of neatly filed duties, suitable to one’s station in life, and therefore respectable. It had no wider ethical interest of any sort at all. This is not to say Miss Harris was insensitive. On the contrary, she was rather touchy on all sorts of points of etiquette relating to her position in the houses in which she was employed. Where she had her lunch, with whom she had it, and who served it, were matters of great importance to her and she was painfully aware of the subtlest nuances in her employers’ attitude towards herself. About her new job she was neatly optimistic. Lady Carrados had impressed her favourably, had treated her, in her own phrase, like a perfect lady. Miss Harris walked briskly along an upstairs passage and tapped twice, not too loud and not too timidly, on a white door.
“Come in,” cried a far-away voice.
Miss Harris obeyed and found herself in a large white bedroom. The carpet, the walls and the chairs were all white. A cedar-wood fire crackled beneath the white Adam mantelpiece, a white bearskin rug nearly tripped Miss Harris up as she crossed the floor to the large white bed where her employer sat propped up with pillows. The bed was strewn about with sheets of notepaper.
“Oh, good morning, Miss Harris,” said Lady Carrados. “You can’t think how glad I am to see you. Do you mind waiting a moment while I finish this note? Please sit down.”
Miss Harris sat discreetly on a small chair. Lady Carrados gave her a vague, brilliant smile, and turned again to her writing. Miss Harris with a single inoffensive glance had taken in every detail of her employer’s appearance.
Evelyn Carrados was thirty-seven years old, and on her good days looked rather less. She was a dark, tall woman with little colour but a beautiful pallor. Paddy O’Brien had once shown her a copy of the Madonna di San Sisto and had told her that she was looking at herself. This was not quite true. Her face was longer and had more edge and character than Raphael’s complacent virgin, but the large dark eyes were like and the sleek hair parted down the centre. Paddy had taken to calling her “Donna” after that and she still had his letters beginning: “Darling Donna.” Oddly enough, Bridget, his daughter, who had never seen him, called her mother “Donna” too. She had come into the room on the day Miss Harris was interviewed and had sat on the arm of her mother’s chair. A still girl with a lovely voice. Miss Harris looking straight in front of her remembered this interview now while she waited. “He hasn’t appeared yet,” thought Miss Harris, meaning Sir Herbert Carrados, whose photograph faced her in a silver frame on his wife’s dressing-table.
Lady Carrados signed her name and hunted about the counterpane for blotting-paper. Miss Harris instantly placed her own pad on the bed.
“Oh,” said her employer with an air of pleased astonishment, “you’ve got some! Thank you so much. There, that’s settled her, hasn’t it?”
Miss Harris smiled brightly. Lady Carrados licked the flap of an envelope and stared at her secretary over the top.
“I see you’ve brought up my mail,” she said.
“Yes, Lady Carrados. I did not know if you would prefer me to open all—”
“No, no. No, please not.”
Miss Harris did not visibly bridle, she was much too competent to do anything of the sort, but she was at once hurt in her feelings. A miserable, a hateful, little needle of mortification jabbed her thin skin. She had overstepped her mark.
“Very well, Lady Carrados,” said Miss Harris politely.
Lady Carrados bent forward.
“I know I’m all wrong,” she said quickly. “I know I’m not behaving a bit as one should when one is lucky enough to have a secretary but, you see, I’m not used to such luxuries, and I still like to pretend I’m doing everything myself. So I shall have all the fun of opening my letters and all the joy of handing them over to you. Which is very unfair, but you’ll have to put up with it, poor Miss Harris.”
She watched her secretary smile and replied with a charming look of understanding.
“And now,” she said, “we may as well get it done, mayn’t we?”
Miss Harris laid the letters in three neat heaps on the writing-pad and soon began to make shorthand notes of the answers she was to write for her employer. Lady Carrados kept up a sort of running commentary.
“Lucy Lorrimer. Who is Lucy Lorrimer, Miss Harris? I know, she’s that old Lady Lorrimer who talks as if everybody was deaf. What does she want? ‘Hear you are bringing out your girl and would be so glad—’ Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we? If it’s a free afternoon we’d be delighted. There you are. Now, this one. Oh, yes, Miss Harris, now this is most important. It’s from Lady Alleyn, who is a great friend of mine. Do you know who I mean? One of her sons is a deadly baronet and the other is a detective. Do you know?”
“Is it Chief Inspector Alleyn, Lady Carrados? The famous one?”
“That’s it. Terribly good-looking and remote. He was in the Foreign Office when the war broke out and then after the war he suddenly became a detective. I can’t tell you why. Not that it matters,” continued Lady Carrados, glancing at the attentive face of her secretary, “because this letter is nothing to do with him. It’s about his brother George’s girl whom his mother is bringing out and I said I’d help. So you must remember, Miss Harris, that Sarah Alleyn is to be asked to everything. And Lady Alleyn to the mothers’ lunches and all those games. Have you got that? There’s her address. And remind me to write personally. Now away we go again and—”
She stopped so suddenly that Miss Harris glanced up in surprise. Lady Carrados was staring at a letter which she held in her long white fingers. The fingers trembled slightly. Miss Harris with a sort of fascination looked at them and at the square envelope. There was a silence in the white room — a silence broken only by the hurried inconsequent ticking of a little china clock on the mantelpiece. With a sharp click the envelope fell on the heap of letters.