Kitabı oku: «Death in a White Tie»

CHAPTER 1 The Protagonists

‘Roderick,’ said Lady Alleyn, looking at her son over the top of her spectacles, ‘I am coming out.’

‘Out?’ repeated Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn vaguely. ‘Out where, mama? Out of what?’

‘Out into the world. Out of retirement. Out into the season. Out. Dear me,’ she added confusedly, ‘how absurd a word becomes if one says it repeatedly. Out.’

Alleyn laid an official-looking document on the breakfast-table and stared at his mother.

‘What can you be talking about?’ he said.

‘Don’t be stupid, darling. I am going to do the London season.’

‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’

‘I think perhaps I have. I have told George and Grace that I will bring Sarah out this coming season. Here is a letter from George and here is another from Grace. Government House, Suva. They think it charming of me to offer.’

‘Good Lord, mama,’ said Alleyn, ‘you must be demented. Do you know what this means?’

‘I believe I do. It means that I must take a flat in London. It means that I must look up all sorts of people who will turn out to be dead or divorced or remarried. It means that I must give little luncheon-parties and cocktail-parties and exchange cutlets with hard-working mothers. It means that I must sit in ballrooms praising other women’s grand-daughters and securing young men for my own. I shall be up until four o’clock five nights out of seven and I’m afraid, darling, that my black lace and my silver charmeuse will not be quite equal to the strain. So that in addition to buying clothes for Sarah I shall have to buy some for myself. And I should like to know what you think about that, Roderick?’

‘I think it is all utterly preposterous. Why the devil can’t George and Grace bring Sarah out themselves?’

‘Because they are in Fiji, darling.’

‘Well, why can’t she stay in until they return?’

‘George’s appointment is for four years. In four years your niece will be twenty-two. An elderly sort of débutante.’

‘Why has Sarah got to come out? Why can’t she simply emerge?’

‘That I cannot tell you, but George and Grace certainly could. I rather see it, I must say, Roderick. A girl has such fun doing her first season. There is nothing like it, ever again. And now we have gone back to chaperones and all the rest of it, it really does seem to have some of the old glamour.’

‘You mean débutantes have gone back to being treated like hothouse flowers for three months and taking their chance as hardy perennials for the rest of their lives?’

‘If you choose to put it like that. The system is not without merit, my dear.’

‘It may be quite admirable, but isn’t it going to be a bit too exhausting for you? Where is Sarah, by the way?’

‘She is always rather late for breakfast. How wonderfully these children sleep, don’t they? But we were talking about the season, weren’t we? I think I shall enjoy it, Rory. And really and truly it won’t be such hard work. I’ve heard this morning from Evelyn Carrados. She was Evelyn O’Brien, you know. Evelyn Curtis, of course, in the first instance, but that’s so long ago nobody bothers about it. Not that she’s as old as that, poor girl. She can’t be forty yet. Quite a chicken, in fact. Her mother was my greatest friend. We did the season together when we came out. And now here’s Evelyn bringing her own girl out and offering to help with Sarah. Could anything be more fortunate?’

‘Nothing,’ responded Alleyn dryly. ‘I remember Evelyn O’Brien.’

‘I should hope you do. I did my best to persuade you to fall in love with her.’

‘Did I fall in love with her?’

‘No. I could never imagine why, as she was quite lovely and very charming. Now I come to think of it, you hadn’t much chance as she herself fell madly in love with Paddy O’Brien who returned suddenly from Australia.’

‘I remember. A romantic sort of bloke, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes. They were married after a short engagement. Five months later he was killed in a motor accident. Wasn’t it awful?’

‘Awful.’

‘And then in six months or so along came this girl, Bridget. Evelyn called her Bridget because Paddy was Irish. And then, poor Evelyn, she married Herbert Carrados. Nobody ever knew why.’

‘I’m not surprised. He’s a frightful bore. He must be a great deal older than Evelyn.’

‘A thousand years and so pompous you can’t believe he’s true. You know him evidently.’

‘Vaguely. He’s something pretty grand in the City.’

Alleyn lit his mother’s cigarette and his own. He walked over to the french window and looked across the lawn.

‘Your garden is getting ready to come out, too,’ he said. ‘I wish I hadn’t to go back to the Yard.’

‘Now, darling? This minute?’

‘Afraid so. It’s this case.’ He waved some papers in his hand. ‘Fox rang up late last night. Something’s cropped up.’

‘What sort of case is it?’

‘Blackmail, but you’re not allowed to ask questions.’

‘Rory, how exciting. Who’s being blackmailed? Somebody frightfully important, I hope?’

‘Do you remember Lord Robert Gospell?’

‘Bunchy Gospell, do you mean? Surely he’s not being blackmailed. A more innocent creature—’

‘No, mama, he isn’t. Nor is he a blackmailer.’

‘He’s a dear little man,’ said Lady Alleyn emphatically. ‘The nicest possible little man.’

‘Not so little nowadays. He’s very plump and wears a cloak and a sombrero like GKC.’

‘Really?’

‘You must have seen photographs of him in your horrible illustrated papers. They catch him when they can. “Lord Robert (‘Bunchy’) Gospell tells one of his famous stories.” That sort of thing.’

‘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.’

II

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.

‘Excuse me, Lady Carrados,’ said Miss Harris, ‘but are you feeling unwell?’

‘What? No. No, thank you.’

She put the letter aside and picked up another. Soon Miss Harris’s pen was travelling busily over her pad. She made notes for the acceptance, refusal and issuing of invitations. She made lists of names with notes beside them and she entered into a long discussion about Lady Carrados’s ball.

‘I’m getting Dimitri—the Shepherd Market caterer, you know—to do the whole thing,’ explained Lady Carrados. ‘It seems to be the—’ she paused oddly ‘—safest way.’

‘Well, he is the best,’ agreed Miss Harris. ‘You were speaking of expense, Lady Carrados. Dimitri works out at about twenty-five shillings a head. But that’s everything. You do know where you are and he is good.’

‘Twenty-five? Four hundred, there’ll be, I think. How much is that?’

‘Five hundred pounds,’ said Miss Harris calmly.

‘Oh, dear, it is a lot, isn’t it? And then there’s the band. I do think we must have champagne at the buffet. It saves that endless procession to the supper-room which I always think is such a bore.’

‘Champagne at the buffet,’ said Miss Harris crisply. ‘That will mean thirty shillings a head, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, how awful!’

‘That makes Dimitri’s bill six hundred. But, of course, as I say, Lady Carrados, that will be every penny you pay.’

Lady Carrados stared at her secretary without replying. For some reason Miss Harris felt as if she had made another faux pas. There was, she thought, such a very singular expression in her employer’s eyes.

‘I should think a thousand pounds would cover the whole of the expenses, band and everything,’ she added hurriedly.

‘Yes, I see,’ said Lady Carrados. ‘A thousand.’

There was a tap at the door and a voice called: ‘Donna!’

‘Come in, darling!’

A tall, dark girl carrying a pile of letters came into the room. Bridget was very like her mother but nobody would have thought of comparing her to the Sistine Madonna. She had inherited too much of Paddy O’Brien’s brilliance for that. There was a fine-drawn look about her mouth. Her eyes, set wide apart, were deep under strongly marked brows. She had the quality of repose but when she smiled all the corners of her face tipped up and then she looked more like her father than her mother. ‘Sensitive,’ thought Miss Harris, with a mild flash of illumination. ‘I hope she stands up to it all right. Nuisance when they get nerves.’ She returned Bridget’s punctilious ‘Good morning’ and watched her kiss her mother.

‘Darling Donna,’ said Bridget, ‘you are so sweet.’

‘Hullo, my darling,’ said Lady Carrados, ‘here we are plotting away for all we’re worth. Miss Harris and I have decided on the eighth for your dance. Uncle Arthur writes that we may have his house on that date. That’s General Marsdon, Miss Harris. I explained, didn’t I, that he is lending us Marsdon House in Belgrave Square? Or did I?’

‘Yes, thank you, Lady Carrados. I’ve got all that.’

‘Of course you have.’

‘It’s a mausoleum,’ said Bridget, ‘but it’ll do. I’ve got a letter from Sarah Alleyn, Donna. Her grandmother, your Lady Alleyn, you know, is taking a flat for the season. Donna, please, I want Sarah asked for everything. Does Miss Harris know?’

‘Yes, thank you, Miss Carrados. I beg pardon,’ said Miss Harris in some confusion, ‘I should have said, Miss O’Brien, shouldn’t I?’

‘Help, yes! Don’t fall into that trap whatever you do,’ cried Bridget. ‘Sorry, Donna darling, but really!’

‘Ssh!’ said Lady Carrados mildly. ‘Are those your letters?’

‘Yes. All the invitations. I’ve put a black mark against the ones I really do jib at and all the rest will just have to be sorted out. Oh, and I’ve put a big Y on the ones I want specially not to miss. And—’

The door opened again and the photograph on the dressing-table limped into the room.

Sir Herbert Carrados was just a little too good to be true. He was tall and soldierly and good-looking. He had thin sandy hair, a large guardsman’s moustache, heavy eyebrows and rather foolish light eyes. You did not notice they were foolish because his eyebrows gave them a spurious fierceness. He was not, however, a stupid man but only a rather vain and pompous one. It was his pride that he looked like a soldier and not like a successful financier. During the Great War he had held down a staff appointment of bewildering unimportance which had kept him in Tunbridge Wells for the duration and which had not hampered his sound and at times brilliant activities in the City. He limped a little and used a stick. Most people took it as a matter of course that he had been wounded in the leg, and so he had—by a careless gamekeeper. He attended military reunions with the greatest assiduity and was about to stand for Parliament.

Bridget called him Bart, which he rather liked, but he occasionally surprised a look of irony in her eyes and that he did not at all enjoy.

This morning he had The Times under his arm and an expression of forbearance on his face. He kissed his wife, greeted Miss Harris with precisely the correct shade of cordiality, and raised his eyebrows at his stepdaughter.

‘Good morning, Bridget. I thought you were still in bed.’

‘Good morning, Bart,’ said Bridget. ‘Why?’

‘You were not at breakfast. Don’t you think perhaps it would be more considerate to the servants if you breakfasted before you started making plans?’

‘I expect it would,’ agreed Bridget and went as far as the door.

‘What are your plans for today, darling?’ continued Sir Herbert, smiling at his wife.

‘Oh—everything. Bridget’s dance. Miss Harris and I are—are going into expense, Herbert.’

‘Ah, yes?’ murmured Sir Herbert. ‘I’m sure Miss Harris is a perfect dragon with figures. What’s the total, Miss Harris?’

‘For the ball, Sir Herbert?’ Miss Harris glanced at Lady Carrados who nodded a little nervously. ‘It’s about a thousand pounds.’

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Sir Herbert and let his eyeglass fall.

‘You see, darling,’ began his wife in a hurry, ‘it just won’t come down to less. Even with Arthur’s house. And if we have champagne at the buffet—’

‘I cannot see the smallest necessity for champagne at the buffet, Evelyn. If these young cubs can’t get enough to drink in the supper-room all I can say is, they drink a great deal too much. I must say,’ continued Sir Herbert with an air of discovery, ‘that I do not understand the mentality of modern youths. Gambling too much, drinking too much, no object in life—look at that young Potter.’

‘If you mean Donald Potter,’ said Bridget dangerously, ‘ I must—’

‘Bridgie!’ said her mother.

‘You’re wandering from the point, Bridget,’ said her step-father.

‘Me!’

‘My point is,’ said Sir Herbert with a martyred glance at his wife, ‘that the young people expect a great deal too much nowadays. Champagne at every table—’

‘It’s not that—’ began Bridget from the door.

‘It’s only that it saves—’ interrupted her mother.

‘However,’ continued Sir Herbert with an air of patient courtesy, ‘if you feel that you can afford to spend a thousand pounds on an evening, my dear—’

‘But it isn’t all Donna’s money,’ objected Bridget. ‘It’s half mine. Daddy left—’

‘Bridget, darling,’ said Lady Carrados, ‘breakfast.’

‘Sorry, Donna,’ said Bridget. ‘All right.’ She went out.

Miss Harris wondered if she too had better go, but nobody seemed to remember she was in the room and she did not quite like to remind them of her presence by making a move. Lady Carrados with an odd mixture of nervousness and determination was talking rapidly.

‘I know Paddy would have meant some of Bridgie’s money to be used for her coming out, Herbert. It isn’t as if—’

‘My dear,’ said Sir Herbert with an ineffable air of tactful reproach, and a glance at Miss Harris. ‘Of course. It’s entirely for you and Bridget to decide. Naturally. I wouldn’t dream of interfering. I’m just rather an old fool and like to give any help I can. Don’t pay any attention.’

Lady Carrados was saved the necessity of making any reply to this embarrassing speech by the entrance of the maid.

‘Lord Robert Gospell has called, m’lady, and wonders if—’

‘’Morning, Evelyn,’ said an extraordinarily high-pitched voice outside the door. ‘I’ve come up. Do let me in.’

‘Bunchy!’ cried Lady Carrados in delight. ‘How lovely! Come in!’

And Lord Robert Gospell, panting a little under the burden of an enormous bunch of daffodils, toddled into the room.

III

On the same day that Lord Robert Gospell called on Lady Carrados, Lady Carrados herself called on Sir Daniel Davidson in his consulting-rooms in Harley Street. She talked to him for a long time and at the end of half an hour sat staring rather desperately across the desk into his large black eyes.

‘I’m frightfully anxious, naturally, that Bridgie shouldn’t get the idea that there’s anything the matter with me,’ she said.

‘There is nothing specifically wrong with you,’ said Davidson, spreading out his long hands. ‘Nothing, I mean, in the sense of your heart being overworked or your lungs at all unsound or any nonsense of that sort. I don’t think you are anaemic. The blood test will clear all that up. But’—and he leant forward and pointed a finger at her—‘ but you are very tired. You’re altogether too tired. If I was an honest physician I’d tell you to go into a nursing-home and lead the life of a placid cow for three weeks.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Can’t your daughter come out next year? What about the little season?’

‘Oh, no, it’s impossible. Really. My uncle has lent us his house for the dance. She’s planned everything. It would be almost as much trouble to put things off as it is to go on with them. I’ll be all right, only I do rather feel as if I’ve got a jellyfish instead of a brain. A wobbly jellyfish. I get these curious giddy attacks. And I simply can’t stop bothering about things.’

‘I know. What about this ball? I suppose you’re hard at it over that?’

‘I’m handing it all over to my secretary and Dimitri. I hope you’re coming. You’ll get a card.’

‘I shall be delighted, but I wish you’d give it up.’

‘Truly I can’t.’

‘Have you got any particular worry?’

There was a long pause.

‘Yes,’ said Evelyn Carrados, ‘but I can’t tell you about that.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Sir Daniel, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Les maladies suspendent nos vertus et nos vices.’

She rose and he at once leapt to his feet as if she was royalty.

‘You will get that prescription made up at once,’ he said, glaring down at her. ‘And, if you please, I should like to see you again. I suppose I had better not call?’

‘No, please. I’ll come here.’

‘C’est entendu,’

Lady Carrados left him, wishing vaguely that he was a little less florid and longing devoutly for her bed.

IV

Agatha Troy hunched up her shoulders, pulled her smart new cap over one eye and walked into her one-man show at the Wiltshire Galleries in Bond Street. It always embarrassed her intensely to put in these duty appearances at her own exhibitions. People felt they had to say something to her about her pictures and they never knew what to say and she never knew how to reply. She became gruff with shyness and her incoherence was mistaken for intellectual snobbishness. Like most painters she was singularly inarticulate on the subject of her work. The careful phrases of literary appreciation showered upon her by highbrow critics threw Troy into an agony of embarrassment. She minded less the bland commonplaces of the philistines though for these also she had great difficulty in finding suitable replies.

She slipped in at the door, winked at the young man who sat at the reception desk and shied away as a large American woman bore down upon him with a white-gloved finger, firmly planted on a price in her catalogue.

Troy hurriedly looked away and in a corner of the crowded room, sitting on a chair that was not big enough for him, she saw a smallish round gentleman whose head was aslant, his eyes closed and his mouth peacefully open. Troy made for him.

‘Bunchy!’ she said.

Lord Robert Gospell opened his eyes very wide and moved his lips like a rabbit.

‘Hullo!’ he said. ‘What a scrimmage, ain’t it? Pretty good.’

‘You were asleep.’

‘May have been having a nap.’

‘That’s a pretty compliment,’ said Troy without rancour.

‘I had a good prowl first. Just thought I’d pop in,’ explained Lord Robert. ‘Enjoyed myself.’ He balanced his glasses across his nose, flung his head back and with an air of placid approval contemplated a large landscape. Without any of her usual embarrassment Troy looked with him.

‘Pretty good,’ repeated Bunchy. ‘Ain’t it?’

He had an odd trick of using Victorian colloquialisms; legacies, he would explain, from his distinguished father. ‘Lor’!’ was his favourite ejaculation. He kept up little Victorian politenesses, always leaving cards after a ball and often sending flowers to the hostesses who dined him. His clothes were famous—a rather high, close-buttoned jacket and narrowish trousers by day, a soft wide hat and a cloak in the evening. Troy turned from her picture to her companion. He twinkled through his glasses and pointed a fat finger at the landscape.

‘Nice and clean,’ he said. ‘I like ‘em clean. Come and have tea.’

‘I’ve only just arrived,’ said Troy, ‘but I’d love to.’

‘I’ve got the Potters,’ said Bunchy. ‘My sister and her boy. Wait a bit. I’ll fetch ‘em.’

‘Mildred and Donald?’ asked Troy.

‘Mildred and Donald. They live with me, you know, since poor Potter died. Donald’s just been sent down for some gambling scrape or other. Nice young scamp. No harm in him. Only don’t mention Oxford.’

‘I’ll remember.’

‘He’ll probably save you the trouble by talking about it himself. I like having young people about. Gay. Keeps one up to scratch. Can you see ’em anywhere? Mildred’s wearing a puce toque.’

‘Not a toque, Bunchy,’ said Troy. ‘There she is. It’s a very smart purple beret. She’s seen us. She’s coming.’

Lord Robert’s widowed sister came billowing through the crowd followed by her extremely good-looking son. She greeted Troy breathlessly but affectionately. Donald bowed, grinned and said: ‘We have been enjoying ourselves. Frightfully good!’

‘Fat lot you know about it,’ said Troy good-humouredly. ‘Mildred, Bunchy suggests tea.’

‘I must say I should be glad of it,’ said Lady Mildred Potter. ‘Looking at pictures is the most exhausting pastime, even when they are your pictures, dear.’

‘There’s a restaurant down below,’ squeaked Lord Robert. ‘Follow me.’

They worked their way through the crowd and downstairs. Donald who was separated from them by several strangers, shouted: ‘I say, Troy, did you hear I was sent down?’ This had the effect of drawing everyone’s attention first to himself and then to Troy.

‘Yes, I did,’ said Troy severely.

‘Wasn’t it awful?’ continued Donald, coming alongside and speaking more quietly. ‘Uncle Bunch is furious and says I’m no longer The Heir. It’s not true, of course. He’s leaving me a princely fortune, aren’t you, Uncle Bunch, my dear?’

‘Here we are,’ said Lord Robert thankfully as they reached the door of the restaurant. ‘Will you all sit down. I’m afraid I must be rather quick.’ He pulled out his watch and blinked at it. ‘I’ve an appointment in twenty minutes.’

‘Where?’ said Troy. ‘I’ll drive you.’

‘Matter of fact,’ said Lord Robert, ‘it’s at Scotland Yard. Meeting an old friend of mine called Alleyn.’