Tessa d'Arblay

by Malcolm Macdonald

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

London, 1888. Tessa d'Arblay is the 22-year-old daughter of an eccentric widower-clergyman living in the East End. The household is managed by her even more eccentric aunt, a situation that leads Tessa to seek the help of one Dr. Segal, a noted Victorian brain specialist. Her innocent enquiries draw her into a bizarre and ultimately horrific sequence of events. Through Dr. Segal, she meet the strangely compelling Dante Rosen, a successful artist and member of the Oscar Wilde set. Another of her new acquaintences, budding actress Connie Saunders, warns Tessa against any involvement with Rosen, whom she thinks of as Satan made flesh. But Tessa comes to believe Segal is the evil influence, not her beloved Dante. Too late she learns the dreadful truth, more appalling than even Connie Saunder's wildest imaginings... For more information and a full bibliography visit www.malcolmmacdonald.org

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 310

Sample

“Natural Causes,” said the jury, and “Natural Causes” was the coroner’s verdict. Peter Laird had died of “Natural Causes”.

Tessa left the courtroom before the concluding formalities. The whole business was still so hard to grasp – even now, a month later. Poor old Peter had seemed so well right up until the very day of his death. It was frightening. How could we ever tell?

For early May – indeed, for any time of year – it was hot. The street was like a hob. She stood uncertainly at the top of the broad stone steps and felt the heat radiating up at her. In the courthouse, the heavy old stone walls had kept the place somewhat cool; but here it attacked her like a living thing. She could feel glowing worms of it edging inward at her cuffs and ankles; she could sense its pressure on her shoulders. She spread her parasol.

“Be all right going home will you, Miss d’Arblay?” the sergeant asked.

“Yes thank you, Sergeant Keene. I’ll take a cab.”

Keene had been one of Peter’s friends, too. He had known Tessa since her childhood. On her fourth birthday, in 1868, he had called to the vicarage to see her father in connection with some missing church property; and then he had stayed for the party and had performed a comic recitation from Thomas Hood. But he didn’t like to be reminded of it these days.

“You shouldn’t have come at all,” he added. “I’ll escort you to the rank at the corner.”

“Oh I don’t want to put you to any trouble …”

“I know you don’t, miss. But you already have.”

“You’re as tactful as ever!” she told him.

“Tact catches no criminals.”

They made an odd pair, sauntering along the street, not really knowing what to say to each other; she, tall, angular, lithe in all her movements; he, only slightly taller, powerful as a bear; both restless in each other’s company.

“There’ll be murders done today,” he said with a kind of savage glee.

“I don’t suppose that surgeon – Dr. Segal was it? I don’t suppose he could have made a mistake?”

He ignored her. “People drink too much, see. Because of the heat. They start remembering old wrongs. Then they want to right ’em.”

Sparrows were dipping in the Metropolitan Horse & Cattle Association trough halfway along the street, sprinkling water all around. Some fell cool on her muslin sleeves; but the untouched parts of her merely felt all the hotter. She wanted to talk to Keene but instead her mind seized on a ridiculous fantasy in which she ran naked through a crowd of onlookers and jumped into the trough. She grew angry with herself.

That sort of thing happened so often these days. Important thoughts would be pushed out of her mind by some quite ludicrous (and often scandalous) image. Sometimes it made her wonder if she was entirely right in the head.

“Yes!” Keene barked to fill the silence. “Forsooth!”

Peter used to say Forsooth.

“You should have stayed at home,” Keene went on. “Doing your pretty little paintings.”

Tessa contained her annoyance. “Art has nothing to do with prettiness,” she said evenly. “Art could make anything beautiful.”

“Even murder?” he asked scornfully.

“Of course. What is a crucifixion if it isn’t murder? There are beautiful crucifixions all over the world. And just think of the battle scenes and the …”

“All right, all right. Sorry I spoke. Even so, I don’t know why you came. A coroner’s inquest is no place for a pretty young girl.”

“Peter was a good friend,” she reminded him. “Also I found it so hard to believe – this brain-tumour business.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t?”

His expression was dubious, watchful, provoking her to talk.

She now wished she hadn’t started this particular hare. “What strikes me as being so odd,” she tried to explain, “is that Peter was so well. There never was a man who seemed more fit. It’s frightening, don’t you think? I mean – any of us might have one of these tumours. You or I, this very minute. And we could go out” – she snapped her fingers – “just like that!” She looked at him for some response. Getting none, she added, “We haven’t the first idea about what’s really going on inside our heads, have we.”

“Are you saying you think his death was odd?” Keene sighed and sucked his teeth. Without pausing for her denial he went on: “Funny thing about detective work – my inspector and I often talk about it. You’d think it’d be an ideal job for a woman. It’s nearly all drudgery, nearly all dull routine and pure repetition – all the things women are so good at. And even the exciting bits – you’d think they’d be right up a woman’s street.”

“But I’m not at all implying there’s anything suspicious about his death. It’s just that …”

Again he ignored her. “The exciting bits are all about people, see? Questions about people – what did he look like … what was she wearing … were they telling the truth with their eyes but something else with their mouths … all things like that. And you also need a head for gossip. You’d think women were born detectives, wouldn’t you? You know why they’re not? You know the one fatal weakness your lot’s got?”

“You’re going to tell me, whatever I say.”

“This is what the inspector and I have decided. The thing that will always stop you lot being good detectives is the thing you’re exhibiting now: intuition!”

“You’re putting words into my mouth!” Her voice sounded querulous in that somnolent backwater of a street. “I’m not questioning Dr. Segal’s competence. In fact, I’d very much like to talk to him – about the mind, you know. Things like that.”

“Things like that,” he repeated flatly.

“Behaviour – you know. People always said my mother was eccentric when she was alive. And my Aunt Bo … well, she is a bit odd, isn’t she? Wouldn’t you say?”

Keene snorted. “The whole of your family’s behaved oddly as long as I’ve known them. And that’s an ungallant number of years by now.”

She suspected that her question had made him uncomfortable, and that his jocularity was a way of saying he didn’t really wish to discuss it with her. She felt snubbed. “The fact that you’ve known me ever since you dandled me on your knee, Sergeant Keene, and recited The Drowning Ducks, doesn’t give you the right to …” Again she heard how petulant she was beginning to sound. Her complaint shrivelled in the heat.

“Does your father know you’re here?” he asked conversationally.

She knew he was only trying to change the subject, but she was annoyed with him now. “Is that a question or a music-hall song?” she asked. “If it’s a question, I consider it rather impertinent. I am twenty-four years old, you know.”

Keene stopped and stared at her. “I consider it raahther pertinent, Miss d’Arblay,” he said at last, mimicking her accent. “If you were to fall down in a swoon, what with this heat and all, and if I wasn’t here, no one’d know where to send you home, would they! I call that pertinent, don’t you?”

“It may be pertinent to him. But it’s very impertinent of you. Anyway, you are here. Lord, what a stupid conversation!”

He sniffed. “If you say so, miss.”

“I know you don’t think so.”

“I do not.”

She could see he was actually half-amused. She smiled at him and the atmosphere at once grew more cordial. Because they both wanted it so. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must forgive me if I’m a little on edge. I certainly don’t want to fall out with you. Quite the opposite.” She smiled to humour him and then asked swiftly, “What’s Dr. Segal’s address, d’you know? Is it buried somewhere in that encyclopedic mind of yours? I think I will go and see him.”

He grinned and shook his head. “I couldn’t divulge that, Miss d’Arblay.”

“I expect he’s in the register.”

“Very likely.”

There were three cabs at the rank. The sergeant held open the door of the first. “I wish you luck, miss.”

She folded her parasol and deftly prodded his instep with the ferrule. “Humbug, Keene – forsooth! And I’m not getting into that cab. The poor horse is a bag of bones. I’ll leave you to take the driver in charge. He really deserves to be prosecuted.” She looked at the next cab in the rank, challenging Keene to lead her to it and hold its door open, too.

He turned abruptly on his heel and began walking back the way they had come.

She went alone to the next cab, whose driver had nodded off to sleep in the heat. She rapped her parasol against its side. He came awake, blinked rapidly, and screwed up his eyes against the pain of the light. Then he became aware he was still second in the rank. “Take the cab in front, lady,” he said, his voice rasping with phlegm.

“Come down at once and hand me in,” she commanded.

“No, you don’t understand,” he began – but then he stared toward a point somewhere behind her. A moving point. From the look on his face she knew Sergeant Keene was coming back. The man’s next words confirmed it: “Where was you wanting, lady?”

She heard the sergeant’s bootfall on the paving stones immediately behind her. “Twenty-three Finsbury Close,” he commanded. His voice, deep and gravelly, and so near, made her eardrum click.

Without turning around to look at him she said, “The very pertinent address! But I shan’t go there today, thank you. Dr. Segal can wait until tomorrow. Or some other day.” She looked back at the cabby. “Shepherdess Walk, if you please.”

“Down Shoreditch?” the cabby asked in disbelief. It was one of the poor areas of London, next door to Whitechapel, the poorest of all; and though elegant females were not unknown in those parts, their elegance was of a rather brassy kind, far removed from the demure and modest appearance of the young lady who now proposed to enter his cab.

“The Old Vicarage,” the sergeant added.

“Ah!” Light dawned.

“And anyway,” she insisted, “it’s not Shoreditch. It’s Islington.” Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true; but the vicarage was in the better end of Shoreditch – the end that counted as Islington.

The sergeant opened the little half doors and handed her up. She saw he was troubled. She raised her eyebrows, to prompt him.

“The mind’s a funny thing, you know.” He shook his head and pulled a face. “Some inquiries are best left alone. I wouldn’t worry about your family. Things have a way of sorting themselves out.”

“We’ll see,” she answered evasively. But when the cab was bowling along, she said to herself, as if she might otherwise forget it: “Twenty-three Finsbury Close.”

When Tessa arrived home she let herself in quietly by the front door, hoping to go upstairs and change without rousing the house from its usual afternoon slumber. But she almost fell over her father, who was lying full length on the marble-tiled floor of the hall.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’ve never seen you from this angle,” he answered. “You look quite different. And yet you are demonstrably not different. That is to say, the entity which by custom we denote ‘Tessa’ is …”

“I take it you are all right.”

“I thought the marble might be cooler,” he explained. “The month of May has no business to be so hot.”

“And is it cooler?”

“Yes.” He sat up, dusting off his no-longer-quite-so-white shirt. He frowned. “There’s something I ought to ask you something I ought to ask you something I ought to ask you …” He went on repeating the phrase while his fingers drummed on the floor. Then he brightened. “Oh yes! I ought to ask you where you’ve been?”

She helped him up and gave him a quick kiss. “Out! Is Bo at home?”

Aunt Bo (who would never let Tessa call her “Aunt”) was the identical-twin sister of Tessa’s late mother, whose first name had been Sinney. The twins had been given these unusual names by their father, Haligon Body, the Cornish mine captain who discovered the famous Wheal Jessica tin lode. He had first called it the Bosinney lode in an attempt to flatter his neighbour, Sir William Bosinney, into sinking some capital into a new mine – the mine that was eventually called Wheal Jessica. In that first flush of enthusiasm he had also baptized his newly born twin daughters Bo and Sinney; by the time he discovered that Sir William was in no position to fund even an egg-and-spoon race much less a tin mine, it was too late – the girls were Bo and Sinney Body, and Bo and Sinney Body they remained until they were transmuted into Bo Fletcher and Sinney d’Arblay by, respectively, Captain Arthur Fletcher of the Merchant Navy and the Reverend Gordon d’Arblay of the established church.

Captain Arthur Fletcher of the Merchant Navy had died five years ago, in 1883, in Fiji, in circumstances that, though not mysterious, were extremely complex; nothing that the Body family engaged in was ever simple. Bo had then come for a short visit to the Old Vicarage. What with one postponement and another, it had already lasted five years; and now, with Sinney’s recent death, it looked set to consume the rest of her life.

“Is Bo at home?” Tessa repeated.

Her father was still grappling with their previous conversation. “So you’ve been out, eh? Then you were doing Good Work, no doubt. What an example you are.” He suppressed a yawn. Then he added with surprising vehemence, “I wish Bo would go out. I wish she’d go away for ever.”

“Why?”

“I keep thinking she’s Sinney. You remember when your mother was ill – toward the end – and she couldn’t find her glasses?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I found them this morning. And Bo came into the room immediately after. And I said to her, ‘Here they are, my dearest’.” His face crumpled at the memory. “I keep forgetting. I keep forgetting.”

Tessa had a sudden fear he would cry. She grasped his arm and hugged it to her. “She shouldn’t wear mother’s clothes the way she does. At least she could change the trimmings or something. I’ll speak to her.”

“Bless you, child. Don’t say I said anything. But she’ll listen to you.”

“She doesn’t listen to me. But of course I won’t tell her you said anything. Not that it’ll make the slightest difference.”

“Like Good Works,” he murmured as he wandered back into his study. “Doing some good without doing any good! Now there’s an interesting point. It is possible, you see, to speak of doing some good, and yet truthfully to report that it has not done any good. The mysteries of language! Yet what else have we, eh?” He was not mocking her, but excusing himself. The Rev. Eli Howells, the local Methodist minister, always referred to him as, “My recruiting sergeant”.

As she went up the second flight of stairs she had another of those half-glimpsed ideas that hinted at importance and vanished into nonsense. She thought of this house, seen from the outside, so sober and respectable, everyone’s idea of a solidly respectable vicarage. That, indeed, was the way it had appeared to her as she stepped out of the cab. Yet the moment she had put her nose inside, what had she found? The owner of the house, a vicar of the established church, lying supine on the marble floor – and for no better reason than that he thought it might be a little cooler there! It occurred to her that people were like that, too – the outside was quite different from the inside. All those people who knew her as a respectable, well-brought-up vicar’s daughter … what would they think if they could share those fleeting thoughts that ran so often through her mind?

How could anyone ever get at the truth?

She met Bo at the stairhead. When she saw her aunt’s dimly backlit silhouette against the great stained-glass window at the end of the landing, Tessa knew what pangs her father felt; that outline was her mother’s, and not merely because the clothes were hers, too.

“Well?” Bo asked, as if her patience had already run out.

“Well what?”

“I know where you’ve been, my dear. What was the verdict?”

“Oh – natural causes.”

“Men!” Bo said and, turning angrily on her heel, vanished through one of the doorways.

“That’s a splendidly illuminating comment, Bo!” Tessa walked past her aunt’s door and into her own room. There she unpinned her hat and took off her gloves. She felt instantly cooler, and ready to go back and face her aunt.

Conversation with Bo was always a wearing experience, not merely for the sudden darts and lurches of her thought, but also because of her strange intonation. With most people you can half-listen to their words and pick up the rest from their tone of voice. But Bo’s voice was so light and her intonation so erratic, she seemed to be making it up as she went along; she misdirected you a dozen times in every sentence.

“What d’you mean – men?” Tessa asked as she went back into Bo’s room.

“It’s a sort of game they love to play – inquests … rules of evidence … judges in wigs. Freemasons. They’re not really interested in the truth.”

“I think the truth came out all right. Poor old Peter had a tumour. And it …”

“You were in love with him, I know,” Bo said suddenly. “That’s the truth I’m talking about.”

“Don’t be absurd!”

“You were. The very heat of your denial proves it. Lord – why do we have to depend on men of all things!”

Tessa sighed. “How d’you feel, Bo?”

“Hot.”

“Why don’t you put on some cooler clothes? You must have brought back dozens of tropical dresses. And, talking of your own wardrobe …”

“It’s in memory of your mother, dear. Poor Sinney! Besides, there’s years of wear left in it and I may not have too long myself.”

Tessa gave up – as so often. “What I really meant was, how d’you feel in yourself? Are you well?”

“If you weren’t in love with Peter, you ought to find someone else. It’s a pity he’s gone. You musn’t stay a spinster. Above all, you mustn’t stay a spinster, my dear. Strange things happen in the minds of spinsters. The mind’s a funny thing. I saw some rum goings-on during my travels with dear Captain Fletcher. Did I ever tell you about the time we called at Haiti?”

“Yes, you told me about Haiti.”

“Well, the mind’s a funny thing. Just try and remember that.”

“Are we an ordinary family, Bo,” Tessa asked. “Is there any history of madness?”

“People often called Sinney eccentric,” her aunt admitted. “That’s the English way of saying mad-but-rich. But I doubt, in fact, whether Sinney was mad – or truly eccentric. She was undoubtedly strong-minded (like all of us Bodys). And she was also – though she’s my own sister I have to say it – she was also disastrously ignorant. And not just of book learning, either. She knew nothing of life and people. She was the instant friend of every idle mendicant and plausible sponger who crossed her path. There never was a stouter champion of all idiotic causes; nor a more confident mine of misinformation on every subject under the sun.”

“But she wasn’t mad?” Tessa insisted.

Bo shook her head cheerfully. “You may not realize this, darling, but you owe your own superior education entirely to your mother’s ignorance. It so shocked your Grandpa d’Arblay that he felt he ought to do something about it.”

“I don’t think my education’s all that superior.”

Bo snorted. “That’s because you don’t know many other young girls of your own class!”

“I have no standard of comparison for so many things. I just have to read books and the papers and make up my own mind.” She sighed.

But Bo laughed. “Good thing, too! The girls of your own class are empty-headed ninnies for the most part. Not many of them had a fine scholar like Grandpa d’Arblay to teach them. You may thank Providence he was a long-standing widower with a fair bit of money and more than enough time to undertake your education himself.”

“I just thought he enjoyed it. I certainly did.”

“Oh, and so did he. Too much. He, I may say, was no great believer in education for women. I’m quite sure he intended to impart no more than the usual accomplishments – reading, writing, a smattering of classical tags, and enough arithmetic to oversee the household accounts. But he was a learned man, as you well remember. What’s more, he was actually fond of learning. And you were such an apt and challenging pupil. That’s why he went much farther than he ever intended – to the point, indeed, where you no longer needed him. That was a terrible day for him, you know – when he saw what he’d done, when he realized you could go to the library and take out books on chemistry, geology, comparative grammar, musical scores, medieval poetry … all those things that used to take your fancy.”

“And painting. It wasn’t just books.”

Bo picked nonexistent lint off her satin bedspread. For Bo, Tessa’s interest in painting (which verged on an obsession) did not exist; the very word was unhearable.

“Your father must press for a new curate,” Bo said decisively.

“Did you think Peter behaved at all strangely, toward the end, I mean?”

“There was a certain glow in his eyes when he looked at you, of course,” Bo began. “I suppose you know he was as passionately in love with you as you were with him.” Then her mind saw a new path. “But take care – it’s not always easy to tell. All men are a bit like that. They get that look in their eye when they see a pretty woman. They’re devils. I wish your father …” She fell into a brief reverie. Coming out of it, she added, “Will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Talk to him about it, of course. What have I just been saying? I sometimes think you don’t hear a word I utter. I don’t know where your mind is half the time.”

And Bo was so positive that for a moment Tessa even wondered whether it was she, rather than her aunt, who had mentally withdrawn from the conversation.

“I will talk to him about it,” she promised.

Bo brightened at once. “Bless you, my dear.”

Back in her own room, Tessa wrote it down, in case she might forget it:

23 Finsbury Close.

Then she added: Soon!

The house was grander than she had expected. It proclaimed Dr. Segal as a proprietor of some wealth, a careful man, but not a poor one. The building, indeed, the whole terrace of houses, was almost new; each dwelling was tall and narrow, with four principal floors plus basement and attics. The walls, which faced south onto Finsbury Close, were of deep red brick with carved stonework around the doors and windows. These were houses for doctors, barristers, wholesale merchants, and “people in the City”. In fact, the northern boundary of the City of London lay just two streets away.

Dr. Segal’s house was different in that it stood at the end of the terrace and so commanded two views – one to the poor east, one to the rich south; it also had a small side garden as well as the back garden enjoyed by each other house in the terrace. From the street all one could see of either garden, back or side, was the disciplined top of a tall, stout hedge of privet. The doctor was obviously something of a private person.

As she mounted by the front steps she noticed that the cast iron railings were already being attacked by the corrosive air of the city, even through what must be several layers of new paint. The bellpull was a brightly polished brass lever. Beside it the nameplate read: Dr.G.D. SEGAL, M.R.C.P., F.R.C.S. and then, in smaller type below: Surgery in mews at rear.

She went to look at the mews, which were opposite the side-garden. There a two-storey brick building housed the surgery, consulting rooms, and dispensary. She debated whether to call there rather than at the house itself, but in the end decided upon the house; after all, her visit was more private than professional. She pulled the brass lever; deep within the house a bell jangled harshly.

As she waited, she turned to face the street. The houses opposite were smaller, affording a view of the dome of St. Paul’s, less than a mile away to the southwest. The day was generally less than a mile away to the southwest. The day was generally oppressive and overcast, but just at that moment the sun came out over the cathedral, warming the grimy black of its stones to a dark grey-green. This fanfare of light lasted a moment only; the window in the clouds passed on and the building was black once more, streaked white where the rain had etched the ancient stone. It looked like an incompetent marble cake.

The door was answered by a maid, a young woman of Tessa’s own age and height but blonde in colouring. Her movements were nervy, her face foxy and alert, her eye restless. Tessa gave in her name and her father’s card but said merely that she had an important request to make of the doctor. The maid let her into the lobby and asked her please to wait there and she’d see was the doctor at home.

Inner doors of patterned glass barred Tessa’s view of the rest of the hall. While she waited, she took careful, nervous stock of the lobby: a dark-brown tiled floor with Roman motifs; a brassbound elephant’s-foot umbrella stand with two men’s umbrellas and a silver-topped cane, also a broken shooting stick; a locked letter basket, empty; an oak hallstand carved with pussylike lions, peering out among fronds of acanthus – all the gloves in the drawer were men’s; the silvering on the looking glass was poisoned with growing circles of damp, but the damp had not come from this house. The walls were papered in a dark pattern of maroon, crimson, and purple. It was all very heavy and masculine. There was nothing to suggest the presence or influence of a Mrs. Segal. Even the perfume on the air of the house was spicy rather than feminine; it was like the exotic aromas that sometimes drifted up from the East India Dock.

Until that moment Tessa had no idea why she was making such a careful note of all these details. Suddenly it struck her that she was trying to crowd out a certain fear – what on earth was she going to say to Dr. Segal?

“Do forgive me, doctor, but how do our minds really work?”

“Er, it’s just that I was a friend of Peter Laird’s and I saw no sign of any abnormality in his behaviour, so …”

Impossible phrase after impossible phrase went tumbling through her mind. She had just decided to drop the whole thing and leave when the maid returned and asked “of what nature the request might be”?

“Er … it doesn’t matter. I was mistaken,” Tessa said. “Convey my apologies. I’ll go.”

A change came over the maid. She looked around, shut the inner doors, and stared intently at Tessa. In some subtle way, she was no longer a maid. Tessa was only half-surprised when the woman said, “It’s up to you, of course.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“May God strike off my head were I to encourage a body to tangle with that one.” She jerked her head toward the interior, presumably toward her master. “But if you really need the doctor” – she winked – “this is the place, all right. I could tell you things you could hold over him. He wouldn’t refuse.”

Tessa, too innocent to grasp the innuendo at once, stared blankly. “Who are you?” she asked. It even seemed possible that this was, in fact, the mistress of the house, playing the maid as some kind of prank or forfeit.

“Saunders, Miss.” She curtseyed, dropping briefly back into her role and her cockney accent. “As I say – it’s up to you. He’s the devil – but so’s the other thing.”

The woman’s strange manner and incomprehensible words piqued Tessa’s curiosity. She simply had to meet Dr. Segal. She drew herself up and said, “Please tell your master that my request arises out of the death of Mr. Peter Laird.”

The maid’s eyes narrowed. She seemed about to say more but then went to do as she had been told, forgetting to close one of the inner doors. Tessa eased it further open with her parasol. The spicy perfume was immediately stronger.

She no longer felt worried. When she met Dr. Segal she’d talk about the tumour – how the news of it had surprised her and so on. If he opened up and showed willing to talk, she could steer the conversation around to the more general question. Calmly she surveyed the newly revealed interior.

The hall was lined with that same dark paper. The tiles, burnt umber in colour, ran uncarpeted to the foot of the stairs and beyond, to a green baize door. The only furnishing she had time to notice was a black oak sideboard, carved in the style of the hallstand. Again the impression was exclusively masculine; this was either a bachelor establishment or the house of a very subdued woman married to an overbearing man. Dr. Segal had not struck her as overbearing when she had seen him in the coroner’s court.

He came out at once, as soon as the maid passed on this new information. “My dear Miss d’Arblay – do forgive me for keeping you waiting out here …” he began. Then, when he could actually see her in the light of the lobby, he paused. “But weren’t you at the inquest yesterday?”

“I didn’t think you noticed.”

“Oh, I did. Indeed I did. Do come in. Are you alone?” He looked around, though it was quite obvious no one else was there. He led her into his drawing room, leaving the door open. The overwhelming impression here, too, was of darkness – a dark, Turkey-red carpet on polished black floorboards; distempered wa