“Who might not be such a good idea under the circumstances.”
“Well, I must say it’s about time you came round to my way of thinking, Mrs. H., ’cos my name’s not Roxie Malloy if there isn’t a nasty nephew or sneaky sister-in-law at the bottom of this.” The woman could be unbearably smug, but I reminded myself that one had to keep Lady Krumley front and center.
“I’m merely keeping an open mind. No more, no less. You can fill me in on any other information you’ve acquired when I pick you up.” I not only had my raincoat back on but also was wearing Tobias around my neck as a scarf. That cat was worse than the children for demanding attention the minute I got on the phone. He would drop off a wardrobe onto my head or, as on this occasion, leap from the table onto my arm and shin the rest of the way with a steel-clawed determination worthy of an assault of the Alps. By the time I had disentangled him, Freddy had stuck his head around the kitchen door to say that he had a lovely pot of tea ready. And if I was in the mood to turn a loaf of bread into a plateful of sandwiches we could have an early lunch. I hated to see the light go out in his eyes. It’s a tough business being a housewife pretending to be a P.I. I told him, while draining half a cup of tea, that there was sliced ham, lettuce and tomatoes in the fridge, but he would have to assemble them on a plate without any help from me because I had to meet up with Mrs. Malloy.
“Ah!” He stroked his beard, eyes gleaming. “So the Krumley case thickens.”
“Freddy,” I rammed a rain hat on my head, “do not be melodramatic.”
“What? Me? Make mountains out of molehills?” He staggered backward until he rammed up against the sink. “Her ladyship has merely been in a near fatal car accident that may or may not be the result of foul play. She’s lying in The Cottage Hospital at Mucklesby, clutching her oxygen mask, clawing at all the tubes while waiting for you and Mrs. Malloy to arrive so she can impart some vital piece of the puzzle before she gasps her last.”
“Good marks for listening.”
“No need to thank me,” he said with a winsome smile, “someone has to look out for you. And Ben’s not here to do it.”
“I’m sure there’s plenty to keep him occupied at Abigail’s,” I replied with superb nonchalance. “Not that you don’t do a great job, Freddy, but he always likes to catch up after being away on a trip. He didn’t happen to phone while I was at the vicarage?”
“It so chances that he did. Said to tell you he would collect Rose from her play group at 1:00 and go back for the twins at 3:30.”
“Oh, splendid!”
And so it was, because now I wouldn’t have to shift my attention away from Lady Krumley every five minutes to check my watch. Driving down the Cliff Road I heroically banished Ben, between one sniff and the next, from my mind. I was wondering just how badly Lady Krumley had been injured when I drew level with Abigail’s. Ben’s car was neither out front nor visible in the side parking lot. Nothing to that of course, although at 11:30 he would not have set off to collect Rose. There were dozens of places he might have gone. I just couldn’t think of any for the moment. I had the car heater going full blast, and my head was fuzzy. A moment later I was given my answer. While passing the Chitterton Fells Library I saw a man who was unmistakably my husband exiting by the side door with an armload of books balanced precariously under his chin. To honk at him would have been disaster for he would undoubtedly have dropped the lot. So I proceeded on my way, wedged in between a lorry and a woman wobbling along on a bicycle, feeling vaguely comforted. Ben and I were both avid readers. Not much for television, we enjoyed many an evening-especially in wintertime-locked in our own separate worlds yet linked by that special silence that can be better than any amount of talking.
It was no longer raining, but the roads had the black gloss of night and ragged clouds whipped across the sky like clothes blown off a line. What had been a scattering of cottages became rows of tight-faced houses with front doors opening directly onto the street and shops that looked as though they should have signs in the windows warning customers that they entered at their own risk. I drew level with a greengrocer’s. It had boxes of drowned fruit and vege set out front, being sniffed at by a mongrel dog. Catching my eyes he cocked his leg in a desultory fashion and disappeared around a corner. Mucklesby, I decided, was no more attractive by day than at night, a thought shared by Mrs. Malloy when I stopped in the alleyway outside Jugg’s Detective Agency and she climbed into the car.
“What a rat hole of a town!” she said, buckling her safety belt around her middle. She removed her headscarf and patted her blonde hair back into shape. “Course it suits Milk a treat, and us too, Mrs. H., in our line of business. But you couldn’t pay me to live here. Pigeon muck everywhere you step, and the whole place smelling of cat’s pee. Drive on do.” She gave me a nudge that shot the car forward. “Before we catch something and end up in the hospital along with Lady Krumley.”
I started to say that I was not in any line of business other than being a wife, mother and part-time interior designer, but a glance at her set profile let me know I would be wasting my breath. So I stuck to the issue at hand.
“How critical is Lady Krumley’s condition?”
“Oh, you know them nurses, they can spend ten minutes putting the wind up you just saying ‘the patient is doing as well as can be expected.’” Mrs. Malloy took a compact out of her handbag and waved it at me before powder puffing her nose with enough abandon to cause me to gasp and choke.
“Could you put that thing away,” I said testily. “It has to be every bit as hazardous as secondhand smoke.”
“Well, you’re a fine one to talk! But you know what they say about them holier than thou reformed types.”
I ignored this thrust. “Did the nurse who phoned say if her ladyship was in ICU?”
“What?
“The Intensive Care Unit.”
“No, she didn’t, and watch where you’re driving. You almost went up the back of that van and now me lipstick’s all smeared.” Mrs. Malloy eyed herself in the compact mirror before dropping it back with an irritated plop into her handbag. “And me wanting to look my best for all them handsome young doctors that’s bound to be lining the corridors. Some of the happiest days of me life was watching Emergency Ward 10 on the telly and now that I’m going to live it you have to go and spoil things.”
“That’s not a van?”
“What isn’t?” Mrs. Malloy was dabbing at her purple lips with both pinkies.
“The one you just said I almost hit.” I rounded a corner and drove under a short brick tunnel and emerged into a parking lot. “It’s an ambulance. And this is the Cottage Hospital.”
“Well, I could have told you that! There’s the door to outpatients. Don’t see as we can go too far wrong if we go in that way.”
It sounded sensible. But after fifteen minutes of wandering green hallways that hadn’t been updated since the 1940s and not having spotted one handsome young man in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling around his neck, the fact that we were hopelessly lost became my fault.
“Thanks a lot, Mrs. H.! Me feet are killing me. In the time we’ve been here I could have had me insides taken out and put back in again. That’s five times, as I’ve counted, we’ve been around this way. Even them pictures on the wall are beginning to look at us funny.”
She had a point. The expressions on the faces of the illustrious personages who had served this hospital over the past hundred years appeared to have grown increasingly stern. The directions given to us at the information desk had seemed straightforward at the time. We had taken the lift to the second floor as instructed and turned left at the maternity unit. After that it was pretty much all a blur. But it wasn’t my fault that Mrs. M. was wearing her customary four-inch heels. Neither was I to blame because her miniskirted powder pink raincoat now reeked of disinfectant, or so she claimed. I was about to explain that I wasn’t happy at the prospect of wandering these labyrinths for all eternity, when a man in hospital attire came up behind us wheeling a gurney. Mrs. Malloy immediately brightened. The man wasn’t bad looking and the gurney was unoccupied. Stepping away from the wall she stretched her butterfly lips into her most engaging smile and hooked up a thumb. Hadn’t her mother ever told her she was liable to end up in the morgue if she hitchhiked lifts from strange men in hospital corridors?