“His road as much as ours,” Palethorp murmured.
Brevitt smote his own forehead with the flat of his hand and turned up his eyes. He suddenly reached over and held down the horn button. The old man jumped so violently that the bicycle slewed from his grip and fell over. It rocked once or twice and the handlebars quivered. Palethorp was put in mind of a horned animal, fatally shot but trying to get up again.
Brevitt grinned.
Palethorp said nothing. When the other car had gone, he pulled out to give the old man plenty of room and drove on. In his mirror he saw the old man heaving the cycle upright—wearily, yet with a sort of solicitude as if it were indeed a creature and not a machine.
Brevitt leaned forward against his safety belt and scrutinized the road ahead. In time with some tune within his own head, his right fist hammered gently into his left palm.
“Hang on.” He pointed. “There’s a break there, just before the bend.”
The car stopped. In the high thorn hedge a gap had been torn near the ground.
Palethorp spared it no more than a glance, but Brevitt jumped out and squatted to peer through. Experimentally, he squeezed head and some chest into the hole.
“No point,” Palethorp called. “It’s perfectly easy to get in the proper way. Past the house.”
“House?” Brevitt looked disappointed but he got back into his seat.
“Mrs Gloss. This is all part of her place. It’s open ground past those trees. And if there is a car there, either somebody sneaked it up the drive during the night or it belongs to a friend of hers. Simply enough settled by asking.”
The house was a 1928 Tudor mansion, with half-timber facings over roughened white concrete. The steel-framed casement windows had criss-crossed lead strip appliqué with here and there a bottle-glass inset. A complete set of shutters had been grafted in 1937. There was a round dovecot on a pole in the centre of the broad gravel forecourt. The drive from Orchard Road was flanked, where it opened into the forecourt, by two old-style street lamps. One carried the sign “Drury Lane”, the other, “Ye Strande“.
The patrol car crunched to a halt beside the porch, a creosoted half-barn that gave deep shelter to the big white-painted front door. Beside the door, and matching its heavy, ornamental hinges was a wrought-iron bell pull. Palethorp took firm hold of its handle and drew it down. Inside the house there sounded the unctuous double-boyng of an electric chime.
Almost at once they heard footsteps approach across a hard surface. They were brisk and spiky. Palethorp diagnosed a plump woman, short in the leg, busy. Mrs Gloss herself. Not one of the days for hired help. She was not going to relish silly inquiries by policemen.
“Yes?” The door stood open. Mrs Gertrude Gloss, OBE, had the slightly drawn look over one eye that betokened a struggle with hangover that was not yet quite won. Otherwise, she appeared alert, well groomed and not unobliging.
“We are police officers, ma’am.” The superfluous introduction was Brevitt’s. “We’ve had reports concerning an abandoned vehicle.” He looked accusingly at Mrs Gloss’s bosom, as if prompted by association of ideas.
“I don’t think I understand, officer. But perhaps you both had better come in.”
Palethorp noted the return play of the word “officer”. He recognized a gentle warning. Only those whose social or official status allowed them to strew other people’s paths of duty with the flints of criticism employed that form of address in quite so confident yet off-hand a manner.
The entrance hall was tiled in bright terra-cotta. In one corner stood a big stone jar from which splayed tropical grasses. A Tudor arch led to a white staircase laid with new-looking, flower patterned carpet. Each of four doorways, all similarly arched, had a little coloured plaster shield at its apex. Through one half-open door Brevitt glimpsed white porcelain. Downstairs lav, he ruminated, sensing need to be respectful.
Mrs Gloss led them to the lounge. They saw a wide bow-fronted china cabinet packed densely with pieces of porcelain, glasses, miniature jugs and warming pans in varnished copper, little ivory monkeys and elephants, a pair of cigarette cases decorated with designs contrived out of butterfly wings, and a set of model cowbells in six sizes, souvenirs of Chamonix.
Against the opposite wall stood a mahogany-cased grandfather clock with a brass face and a moon phase indicator. The clock was not working. Four oil paintings, all seascapes in heavy gilt frames, had been hung in line and exactly equidistantly from one another across a third wall. The room also contained a large oval rosewood table, a combined radiogram and television set camouflaged as a Jacobean sideboard, and a coterie of armchairs, obese and befrilled.
Across the back of one of the armchairs had been tossed a short fur coat.
Mrs Gloss did not sit down. Nor did she invite the policemen to do so.
“According to this message”—Palethorp made their errand sound an altogether unreasonable affair that he personally much regretted—“the so-called abandoned car is on your property, Mrs Gloss.”
She turned with a faint smile from Palethorp to Brevitt as if inviting him to supply the second half of the joke.
“Red sports car,” Brevitt said. “Under some trees.”
“According to the message,” insisted Palethorp.
“Abandoned?”
“Well—parked. As I say, under some trees. And there was some clothing in it.”
“Female apparel.” Brevitt sniffed, looked away, and probed one ear-hole with a piece of match which he had taken from an inner pocket of his tunic.
“How do you know the car isn’t mine, constable?”
“A sports car, madam?” Palethorp’s tone conveyed reproof.
“No, it isn’t, as a matter of fact. But I’ve a fair idea who the owner might be.”
“You do, madam?” Palethorp, looking suddenly pleased, glanced at Brevitt. Brevitt thriftily put away his match end and from another pocket produced a notebook.
“If we could just have his name, then, madam...”
“Her name,” Mrs Gloss corrected. She frowned. “Look, how did this nonsense start, anyway? Who sent you people here?”
Brevitt’s instinct was to tell her that questions were for policemen to ask and that what he wanted from her was answers and look sharp about it or else, but he managed to keep silent and let Palethorp mumble something about a nine-nine-nine call from someone who had looked inside the car.
“A trespasser, you mean,” said Mrs Gloss.
“It would seem so,” Palethorp agreed uncomfortably.
Mrs Gloss shook her head over the sad ineptitude of authority and said well, they’d better all go together and have a look and get the matter settled.