Without noise, Diana let herself into the flat and stood listening. Mrs. Todd was still pottering about in the kitchen, and the telephone was in the passage where every word would be audible. Slipping into her small blue and white bedroom she sank on the couch-bed to wait. Though she was still breathless, like a diver just emerged from Arctic waters, her deep-rooted sense of security was asserting itself. A false alarm, this. It could be nothing else, for all her mother must have had some unformulated dread lurking in her mind.
“She was trying so hard not to let me guess. I’d have got it out of her if I hadn’t blurted out my engagement right at the start. Oh, God, does that mean she was afraid that Adrian, my Adrian—”
Even to herself she could not finish the sentence, but she knew quite well the meaning of her mother’s dim fear, and that Nicholas Blundell must share that fear, at least since learning about Rose’s peculiar sensations. No telling what the two old friends had said to each other. Supposing her mother had mentioned the fact that Adrian was down to his last hundred pounds and bitterly lamenting his inability to continue his research into obscure brain-tumours?
“But wait! This paper went to press long before Mummy and Uncle Nick had their talk. That means the information, whatever it was, was handed in days ago. By whom? Not Uncle Nick. He’d have said something about it just now.”
At long last she heard the staid steps of Mrs. Todd creak down the passage. The instant the front door closed she sprang for the telephone.
“Prince Regent’s Hospital? Dr. Somervell, please . . .. Oh, Adrian, is it you?”
He had answered with astonishing quickness. Even under her present stress of emotion she wondered how he came to be so close to the instrument, and why his “Hallo” sounded so sharp and brusque. Two mighty efforts she made, one to speak naturally, the other to detect from his voice the information it was vital for her to learn. She had concocted a ruse, but would it conceal her anxiety?
“Dear, I’ve got a small errand, down near the hospital. Shall I call for you? That is, if you’re finishing soon.”
His answer was slightly delayed, and when it did come sounded oddly restrained.
“Good. Fine,” he said, and then, after a second pause, guardedly, “How long will you be?”
“Oh, twenty minutes. That all right?”
“Perfectly. I’ll be seeing you.”
He hung up so abruptly that she was still straining her ears when “Number, please,” struck a jarring note. She realised then that she had discovered just nothing. Adrian’s wariness—if it was that—could mean he had seen the news about Rose, or equally that some third person was standing close by. His telephone manner was always laconic, like his letters. All she had gathered was his eagerness to see her, which had come through somehow, though whether it was a lover’s impatience or something different it was impossible to say. At all events, she would soon know.
At nine o’clock she alighted from a taxi before the main entrance of a huge, dark block of buildings near the British Museum. She paid her fare, and turned so quickly that she ran bolt into a tall, ungainly woman who at that precise moment blundered headlong, blindly down the hospital steps. Diana murmured an apology. The other said nothing, but with one distraught and unseeing look from eyes swollen with weeping gulped down a sob and tore off in the direction of Bloomsbury Square.
Diana stared after her. The features just seen were vaguely familiar, yet so distorted it was hard to connect them with the drab, circumspect female hitherto regarded as a mere adjunct to office furniture. And those clothes! Juvenile, vivid green, absurd, a grotesque caricature, in fact, to say nothing of the mouth crudely smeared with scarlet lipstick. . . . It could not be! Then, in the distance, she noticed, pendent from the creature’s ears by silver chains, two blobs of jade which quivered and bobbed wildly as their owner’s long strides bore them away.
“It is—Elsie Dilworth, whom we were talking about; and those are the ear-rings Aunt Rose . . . but what’s wrong with her? Some one she’s fond of desperately ill?” It took a full half-minute for the alternative explanation to dawn. Adrian—of course! She had been to see him. But why? Her presence here at this particular time seemed faintly ominous, still more her distraught condition. A bird of ill-omen. . . .
The door was opened by a young man, stocky and blond, whose tentative smile Diana did not interpret till later, when she remembered having been introduced to him by Adrian, some months before.
“Dr. Somervell? He was here a second ago. Oh, there he is! Somervell!”
Adrian came towards her, his Burberry over his arm. His air was hesitant and awkward, his face bore a flush from recent anger or mortification, which Diana was quick to connect with the visitor just seen to depart. Breathing hard, he waited till the blond colleague had withdrawn, leaving them alone in the high-vaulted lobby. Then he put an arm round her, dropped it on noticing her expression, but not before she had felt its tense rigidity.
“What’s up?” he inquired. “Anything happened?”
“No—yes. That is—” She reconnoitred and took an oblique tack. “Wasn’t that Elsie Dilworth who just went out?” she asked.
“Oh! So you ran into her, did you?”
“She seemed frightfully upset. Why did she come?” His jaw set hard. Brown eyes smouldering wrathfully, he muttered:
“You can search me. She was here when you rang up. I was doing my best to get rid of her. Plain loony, that’s what it is. Well,” more moderately in answer to her astonished gaze, “call her a hopeless hysteric, if that sounds any better. Let’s wash her out. Shall we push off?”
“Wait, Adrian.” She was speaking as casually as she could manage. “I rather wanted to ask you if by any chance you’ve had a look at the Evening Banner?”
“The which? Oh, the newspaper! No—that is—I do seem to recall buying some paper, this afternoon, on my way to meet you. Though what I did with it, I—”
“There!” She swooped down on his Burberry. “Isn’t that it?”
A dazzling recollection had flooded her brain. She had noticed this self-same paper, folded as now, protruding from his side-pocket when he dumped the Burberry on the tea-shop floor. How like Adrian to buy a paper and not read it! If any doubt had remained, the very way in which he drew the journal forth and abstractedly looked at it would have reassured her. He hadn’t known!
She began to laugh shakily. He lowered the sheet and gazed at her with dismay hard bordering on exasperation. Surfeited with feminine emotion, that was plain.
“Di! What is it?”
“I’m all right. Look, dear, can’t you find it? Here!”
He stared at the item blankly, then with fixed attention. Now she was perfectly sure. He was seeing this news for the first and only time.
“Holy Christmas!” he made slow ejaculation. “What the hell does this mean?”
“How do I know?” She fumbled for her handkerchief. “Somebody’s kicking up a row. Who do you suppose?”
Still staring, he frowned, and scratched his chin. The sight of his brown, sensitive fingers, with the surgeon’s scrupulously clean nails, moved her poignantly. She caught his hand, to find her pressure but half returned.
“Somebody else is crazy,” he muttered. “That’s certain.”
“I think,” she said, “we ought to find out who it is. Is there any person connected with this who—who might bear you a grudge?”
“Bear me a grudge? Why me?” His eyes, meeting hers, narrowed in tardy comprehension. “Good Lord!” He drew in a whistling breath. “So that’s your notion. Here, look at me, Di!”
He wheeled her about so that the overhead light shone down on her face. A searching scrutiny, then his mouth gave a wry twist.
“Crying,” he stated. “That’s funny, too. . . . For the moment I’d clean forgotten I was the lucky heir. Matter of fact, I was too darned mad just now to be wide awake to anything. You, I can see, tumbled to this straight off. You’re thinking, I suppose,” he went on in a formal tone, “what’s fairly obvious—that if there’s been any dirty business over this death, my connection with Mrs. Somervell will come in for some close examination. Is that it?”
His detachment cut her to the quick. Oh, what a fool she’d been, to give way like this!
“Darling, don’t!” she begged. “It was a jar, naturally. And your voice over the telephone—so short, so . . . I understand it now, with that girl bothering you, but when I saw her come out in such a state, can’t you see how worried I was? Do let’s go where we can talk it over quietly. Shall we try Joe’s?”
He looked steadily at her, but did not speak. Instantly she could have bitten her tongue for having made matters worse in her stupid attempt to better them, and her misery increased when, on the silent walk to Southampton Row, she felt his arm stiff as wood within her own. She would put things right between them—oh, very quickly! Still, to have doubted him and to have admitted that doubt was a serious matter.
Joe’s sandwich bar was empty but for a garrulous bagman at the counter. Joe, always genial, placed two anaemic coffees on the far table they chose, offered a few opinions on the next flat-race season, and tactfully lounged away.
“First of all,” said Diana, “can there be anything in this?”
“Why ask me?” was the brief reply. “If I knew, is it likely I’d admit it?”
“Adrian!” she reproached him, and more silence fell.
Presently he said:
“Sorry. No, as I told you before, all I know about the affair is what I was told.”
“Naturally! But you see, I’ve been talking with my mother, who’d just been seeing Uncle Nick. She—well, she was evidently just a little uncomfortable over something Aunt Rose said to her on the telephone. It was about a queer feeling she had, directly after that last meal. While they were speaking, Aunt Rose collapsed. Quite suddenly. I didn’t tell you, but Mummy wrote me about it.”
All he said was “Oh?” in a tone betraying little or nothing; but a moment later he inquired exactly when it was her mother had seen Blundell.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she made quick reply, “but it’s quite impossible for him to have done this. I don’t imagine he had suspected anything out of the way; and yet,” she mused, “he can’t have been so entirely ignorant. Now I think of it, the Home Office people must have been making inquiries of him—and of Petty.”
“Who?”
“Aunt Rose’s housekeeper. Oh—here’s a bit more my mother told me. What do you make of it?” and she repeated what Margaret had said on the subject of the unseen visitor in the kitchen. “It was certainly not Uncle Nick,” she reasoned, “because Petty was talking about him. If the exhumation order had already been issued, it can’t well have been a detective. So who was it?”
He shook his head so faintly that she thought he had scarcely been listening. His eyes had not once met hers, and he was stirring the contents of his cup round and round just as he had done that afternoon. It startled her, therefore, when, quite suddenly, he fixed a frowning gaze on her face and put an abrupt question.
“Your mother,” he said. “Exactly what did she overhear?”