The Clocks - Christie Agatha - Страница 23

‘I mustn’t keep you from your cooking any longer,’ he said, ‘since your niece is not home yet-’

Mrs Lawton in turn looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Only one clock in this room, thank heaven,’ thought the inspector to himself.

‘Yes, she is late,’ she remarked. ‘Surprising really. It’s a good thing Edna didn’t wait.’

Seeing a slightly puzzled expression on Hardcastle’s face, she explained.

‘It’s just one of the girls from the office. She came here to see Sheila this evening and she waited a bit but after a while she said she couldn’t wait any longer. She’d got a date with someone. She said it would do tomorrow, or some other time.’ 

Enlightenment came to the inspector. The girl he had passed in the street! He knew now why she’d made him think of shoes. Of course. It was the girl who had received him in the Cavendish Bureau and the girl who, when he left, had been holding up a shoe with a stiletto heel torn off it, and had been discussing in unhappy puzzlement how on earth she was going to get home like that. A nondescript kind of girl, he remembered, not very attractive, sucking some kind of sweet as she talked. She had recognized him when she passed him in the street, although he had not recognized her. She had hesitated, too, as though she thought of speaking to him. He wondered rather idly what she had wanted to say. Had she wanted to explain why she was calling on Sheila Webb or had she thought he would expect her to say something? He asked:

‘Is she a great friend of your niece’s?’

‘Well, not particularly,’ said Mrs Lawton. ‘I mean they work in the same office and all that, but she’s rather a dull girl. Not very bright and she and Sheila aren’t particular friends. In fact, I wondered why she was so keen to see Sheila tonight. She said it was something she couldn’t understand and that she wanted to ask Sheila about it.’

‘She didn’t tell you what it was?’

‘No, she said it would keep and it didn’t matter.’

‘I see. Well, I must be going.’ 

‘It’s odd,’ said Mrs Lawton, ‘that Sheila hasn’t telephoned. She usually does if she’s late, because the professor sometimes asks her to stay to dinner. Ah, well, I expect she’ll be here any moment now. There are a lot of bus queues sometimes and the Curlew Hotel is quite a good way along the Esplanade. There’s nothing-no message-you want to leave for Sheila?’

‘I think not,’ said the inspector.

As he went out he asked, ‘By the way, who chose your niece’s Christian names, Rosemary and Sheila? Your sister or yourself?’

‘Sheila was our mother’s name. Rosemary was my sister’s choice. Funny name to choose really. Fanciful. And yet my sister wasn’t fanciful or sentimental in any way.’

‘Well, good night, Mrs Lawton.’

As the inspector turned the corner from the gateway into the street he thought, ‘Rosemary-hm…Rosemary for remembrance. Romantic remembrance? Or-something quite different?’

Chapter 13

Colin Lamb’s Narrative

I walked up Charing Cross Road and turned into the maze of streets that twist their way between New Oxford Street and Covent Garden. All sorts of unsuspected shops did business there, antique shops, a dolls’ hospital, ballet shoes, foreign delicatessen shops.

I resisted the lure of the dolls’ hospital with its various pairs of blue or brown glass eyes, and came at last to my objective. It was a small dingy bookshop in a side street not far from the British Museum. It had the usual trays of books outside. Ancient novels, old text books, odds and ends of all kinds, labelled 3d., 6d., 1s., even some aristocrats which had nearly all their pages, and occasionally even their binding intact.

I sidled through the doorway. It was necessary to sidle since precariously arranged books impinged more and more every day on the passageway from the street. Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. The distance between bookshelves was so narrow that you could only get along with great difficulty. There were piles of books perched on every shelf or table. On a stool in a corner, hemmed in by books, was an old man in a pork-pie hat with a large flat face like a stuffed fish. He had the air of one who has given up an unequal struggle. He had attempted to master the books, but the books had obviously succeeded in mastering him. He was a kind of King Canute of the book world, retreating before the advancing book tide. If he ordered it to retreat it would have been with the sure and hopeless certainty that it would not do so. This was Mr Solomon, proprietor of the shop. He recognized me, his fishlike stare softened for a moment and he nodded.

‘Got anything in my line?’ I asked.

‘You’ll have to go up and see, Mr Lamb. Still on seaweeds and that stuff?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, you know where they are. Marine biology, fossils, Antarctica-second floor. I had a new parcel in day before yesterday. I started to unpack ’em but I haven’t got round to it properly yet. You’ll find them in a corner up there.’

I nodded and sidled my way onwards to where a small rather rickety and very dirty staircase led up from the back of the shop. On the first floor were Orientalia, art books, medicine, and French classics. In this room was a rather interesting little curtained corner not known to the general public, but accessible to experts, where what is called ‘odd’ or ‘curious’ volumes reposed. I passed them and went on up to the second floor.

Here archaeological, natural history, and other respectable volumes were rather inadequately sorted into categories. I steered my way through students and elderly colonels and clergymen, passed round the angle of a bookcase, stepped over various gaping parcels of books on the floor and found my further progress barred by two students of opposite sexes lost to the world in a closely knit embrace. They stood there swaying to and fro. I said:

‘Excuse me,’ pushed them firmly aside, raised a curtain which masked a door, and slipping a key from my pocket, turned it in the lock and passed through. I found myself incongruously in a kind of vestibule with cleanly distempered walls hung with prints of Highland cattle, and a door with a highly polished knocker on it. I manipulated the knocker discreetly and the door was opened by an elderly woman with grey hair, spectacles of a particularly old-fashioned kind, a black skirt and a rather unexpected peppermint-striped jumper.

‘It’s you, is it?’ she said without any other form of greeting. ‘He was asking about you only yesterday. He wasn’t pleased.’ She shook her head at me, rather as an elderly governess might do at a disappointing child. ‘You’ll have to try and do better,’ she said.

‘Oh, come off it, Nanny,’ I said.

‘And don’t call me Nanny,’ said the lady. ‘It’s a cheek. I’ve told you so before.’

‘It’s your fault,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t talk to me as if I were a small boy.’

‘Time you grew up. You’d better go in and get it over.’

She pressed a buzzer, picked up a telephone from the desk, and said:

‘Mr Colin…Yes, I’m sending him in.’ She put it down and nodded to me.

I went through a door at the end of the room into another room which was so full of cigar smoke that it was difficult to see anything at all. After my smarting eyes had cleared, I beheld the ample proportions of my chief sitting back in an aged, derelict grandfather chair, by the arm of which was an old-fashioned reading- or writing-desk on a swivel. 

Colonel Beck took off his spectacles, pushed aside the reading-desk on which was a vast tome and looked disapprovingly at me.

‘So it’s you at last?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.