From an open window on the-ground floor of Queen Elizabeth came the voice of Miss Shaw, giving a coaching:
“You might have quoted also from the essay De la Vanité. You remember the passage. Je me suis couché mille fois chez moi, imaginant qu’on me trahirait et assomeroit cette nuit-là-his morbid preoccupation with the idea of death and his-”
The academic machine was grinding on. At the entrance leading to their offices, the Bursar and Treasurer stood together, their hands full of papers. They seemed to be discussing some question of finance. Their glances were secretive and mutually hostile; they looked like sullen dogs, chained together and forced into a grumbling amity by the reprimand of their master. Miss Pyke came down her staircase and passed them without a word. Still without a word she passed Harriet and turned along the plinth. Her head was held high and defiantly. Harriet went in and along to Miss Lydgate’s room. Miss Lydgate, as she knew, was lecturing; she could use her telephone undisturbed. She put her call through to London.
A quarter of an hour later, she hung up the receiver with a sinking heart. Why she should be surprised to learn that Miss Climpson was absent from Town “engaged on a case” she could not have said. It seemed vaguely monstrous that this should be so; but it was so. Would she like to speak to anyone else? Harriet had asked for Miss Murchison, the only other member of the firm who was personally known to her. Miss Murchison had left a year ago to be married. Harriet felt this as almost a personal affront. She did not like to pour all the details of the Shrewsbury affair into the ears of a complete stranger. She said she would write, rang off, and sat feeling curiously helpless.
It is all very well to take a firm line about things, and rush to the telephone, determined to “do something” without delay; other people do not sit with folded hands waiting upon the convenience even of our highly interesting and influential selves. Harriet laughed at her own annoyance. She had made up her mind to instant action, and now she was furious because a business firm had affairs of its own to attend to. Yet to wait any longer was impossible. The situation was becoming a nightmare. Faces had grown sly and distorted overnight; eyes fearful; the most innocent words charged with suspicion. At any moment some new terror might break bounds and carry all before it. She was suddenly afraid of all these women: horti conclusi, fontes signati, they were walled in, sealed down, by walls and seals that shut her out. Sitting there in the clear light of morning, staring at the prosaic telephone on the desk, she knew the ancient dread of Artemis, moon-goddess, virgin-huntress, whose arrows are plagues and death.
It struck her then as a fantastic idea that she should fly for help to another brood of spinsters; even if she succeeded in getting hold of Miss Climpson, how was she to explain matters to that desiccated and elderly virgin? The very sight of some of the poison letters would probably make her sick, and the whole trouble would be beyond her comprehension. In this, Harriet did the lady less than justice; Miss Climpson had seen many strange things in sixty-odd years of boardinghouse life, and was as free from repressions and complexes as any human being could very well be. But, in fact, the atmosphere of Shrewsbury was getting on Harriet’s nerves. What she wanted was someone with whom she did not need to mince her words, somebody who would neither show nor feel surprise at any manifestation of human eccentricity, somebody whom she knew and could trust.
There were plenty of people in London-both men and women-to whom the discussion of sexual abnormalities was a commonplace; but most of them were very little to be trusted. They cultivated normality till it stood out of them all over in knobs, like the muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all. And they talked interminably and loudly. From their bouncing mental health ordinary ill-balanced mortals shrank in alarm. She ran over various names in her mind, but found none that would “The fact is,” said Harriet to the telephone, “I don’t know whether I want a doctor or a detective. But I’ve got to have somebody.”
She wished-and not for the first time-that she could have got hold of Peter Wimsey. Not, of course, that this was the kind of case he could very suitably have investigated himself; but he would probably have known the right person. He at least would be surprised at nothing, shocked at nothing; he had far too wide an experience of the world. And he was completely to be trusted. But he was not there. He had vanished from view at the very moment when the Shrewsbury affair had first come to her notice; it seemed almost pointed. Like Lord Saint-George, she began to feel that Peter really had no right to disappear just when he was wanted. The fact that she had spent five years angrily refusing to contract further obligations towards Peter Wimsey had no weight with her now; she would readily have contracted obligations towards the devil himself, if she could have been sure that the prince of darkness was a gentleman of Peter’s kidney. But Peter was as far beyond reach as Lucifer.
Was he? There was the telephone at her elbow. She could speak to Rome as easily as to London-though at a trifle more expense. It was probably only the financial modesty of the person whose income is all earned by work that made it seem more momentous to ring somebody up across a continent than across a city. At any rate, it could do no harm to fetch Peter’s last letter and find the telephone number of his hotel. She went out quickly, and encountered Miss de Vine.
“Oh!” said the Fellow. “I was coming to look for you. I thought I had better show you this.”
She held out a piece of paper; the sight of the printed letters was odiously familiar:
YOUR TURN’S COMING
“It’s nice to be warned,” said Harriet, with a lightness she did not feel. “Where? when? and how?”
“It fell out of one of the books I’m using,” said Miss de Vine, blinking behind her glasses at the questions, “just now.”
“When did you use the book last?”
“That,” said Miss de Vine, blinking again, “is the odd thing about it. I didn’t. Miss Hillyard borrowed it last night, and Mrs. Goodwin brought it back to me this morning.”
Considering the things Miss Hillyard had said about Mrs. Goodwin, Harriet was faintly surprised that she should have chosen her to run her errands. But in certain circumstances the choice might, of course, be a wise one.
“Are you sure the paper wasn’t there yesterday?”
“I don’t think it could have been. I was referring to various pages, and I think I should have seen it.”
“Did you give it directly into Miss Hillyard’s own hands?”
“No; I put it in her pigeon-hole before Hall.”
“So that anybody might have got hold of it.”
“Oh, yes.”
Exasperating. Harriet took possession of the paper and passed on. It was now not even clear against whom the threat was directed, much less from whom it came. She fetched Peter’s letter, and discovered that in the interval she had made up her mind. She had said she would ring up the head of the firm; and so she would. If he was not technically the head, he was certainly the brains of it. She put the call through. She did not know how long it would take, but left instructions at the Lodge that when it came she was to be searched for and found without fail. She felt abominably restless.
The next piece of news was that a violent quarrel had taken place between Miss Shaw and Miss Stevens, who were normally the closest of friends. Miss Shaw, having heard the full story of the previous night’s adventure, had accused Miss Stevens of frightening Miss Newland into the river; Miss Stevens had in her turn accused Miss Shaw of deliberately playing on the girl’s feelings, so as to work her up into a state of nerves.