“Oh dear.”
“Here’s Jer.”
He came in looking chilled and rather sickly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you had—oh hullo, Em.”
“Hullo, Jer.”
“I’ve told her,” Peregrine said.
“Thank you very much.”
“There’s no need to take it grandly, is there?”
“Jeremy, you needn’t mind my knowing. Truly.”
“I don’t in the least mind,” he said in a high voice. “No doubt you’ll both be surprised to learn I’ve been released with a blackguarding that would scour the hide off an alligator.”
“Surprised and delighted,” Peregrine said. “Where’s the loot?”
“At the Yard.”
Jeremy stood with his hands in his pockets as if waiting for something irritating to occur.
“Do you want the car, Jer? I’m going to the Yard now,” Peregrine said and explained why. Jeremy remarked that Peregrine was welcome to the car and added that he was evidently quite the white-haired Trusty of the Establishment. He stood in the middle of the room and watched them go.
“He is in a rage?” Emily said as they went to the car.
“I don’t know what he’s in but he’s bloody lucky it’s not the lock-up. Come on.”
Alleyn put down Peregrine’s report and gave it a definitive slap. “It’s useful, Fox,” he said. “You’d better read it.”
He dropped it on the desk before his colleague, filled his pipe and strolled over to the window. Like Peregrine Jay, an hour earlier, he looked down at the Thames and he thought how closely this case clung to the river, as if it had been washed up by the incoming tide and left high-and-dry for their inspection. Henry Jobbins of Phipps Passage was a waterside character if ever there was one. Peregrine Jay and Jeremy Jones were not far east along the Embankment. Opposite them The Dolphin pushed up its stage-house and flagstaff with a traditional flourish on Bankside. Behind Tabard Lane in the Borough lurked Mrs. Blewitt while her terrible Trevor, still on the South Bank, languished in St. Terence’s. And as if to top it off, he thought idly, here we are at the Yard, hard by the river.
“But with Conducis,” Alleyn muttered, “we move west and, I suspect, a good deal further away than Mayf air.”
He looked at Fox who, with eyebrows raised high above his spectacles in his stuffy reading-expression, concerned himself with Peregrine’s report.
The telephone rang and Fox reached for it “Super’s room,” he said. “Yes? I’ll just see.”
He laid his great palm across the mouthpiece. “It’s Miss Destiny Meade,” he said, “for you.”
“Is it, by gum! What’s she up to, I wonder. All right. I’d better.”
“Look,” cried Destiny when he had answered. “I know you’re a kind, kind man.”
“Do you?” Alleyn said. “How?”
“I have a sixth sense about people. Now, you won’t laugh at me, will you? Promise.”
“I’ve no inclination to do so, believe me.”
“And you won’t slap me back? You’ll come and have a delicious little dinky at six, or even earlier or whenever it suits, and tell me I’m being as stupid as an owl. Now, do, do, do, do, do. Please, please, please.”
“Miss Meade,” Alleyn said, “it’s extremely kind of you but I’m on duty and I’m afraid I can’t.”
“On duty! But you’ve been on duty all day. That’s worse than being an actor and you can’t possibly mean it.”
“Have you thought of something that may concern this case?”
“It concerns me,” she cried and he could imagine how widely her eyes opened at the telephone.
“Perhaps if you would just say what it is,” Alleyn suggested. He looked across at Fox who, with his spectacles halfway down his nose, blankly contemplated his superior and listened at the other telephone. Alleyn crossed his eyes and protruded his tongue.
“—I can’t really, not on the telephone. It’s too complicated. Look — I’m sure you’re up to your ears and not for the wide, wide world—” The lovely voice moved unexpectedly into its higher and less mellifluous register. “I’m nervous,” it said rapidly. “I’m afraid. I’m terrified. I’m being threatened.” Alleyn heard a distant bang and a male voice. Destiny Meade whispered in his ear, “Please come. Please come.” Her receiver clicked and the dialling tone set in.
“Now who in Melpomene’s dear name,” Alleyn said, “does that lovely lady think she’s leading down the garden path? Or is she? By gum, if she is,” he said, “she’s going to get such a tap on the temperament as hasn’t come her way since she hit the headlines. When are we due with Conducis? Five o’clock. It’s now half past two. Find us a car, Br’er Fox, we’re off to Cheyne Walk.”
Fifteen minutes later they were shown into Miss Destiny Meade’s drawing-room.
It was sumptuous to a degree and in maddeningly good taste: an affair of mushroom-coloured curtains, dashes of Schiaparelli pink, dull satin, Severes plaques and an unusual number of orchids. In the middle of it all was Destiny, wearing a heavy sleeveless sheath with a mink collar: and not at all pleased to see Inspector Fox.
“Kind, kind,” she said, holding out her hand at her white arm’s length for Alleyn to do what he thought best with. “Good afternoon,” she said to Mr. Fox.
“Now, Miss Meade,” Alleyn said briskly, “what’s the matter?” He reminded himself of a mature Hamlet.
“Please sit down. No, please. I’ve been so terribly distressed and I need your advice so desperately.”
Alleyn sat, as she had indicated it, in a pink velvet buttoned chair. Mr. Fox took the least luxurious of the other chairs and Miss Meade herself sank upon a couch, tucked up her feet, which were beautiful, and leaned superbly over the arm to gaze at Alleyn. Her hair, coloured raven black for the Dark Lady, hung like a curtain over her right jaw and half her cheek. She raised a hand to it and then drew the hand away as if it had hurt her. Her left ear was exposed and embellished with a massive diamond pendant.
“This is so difficult,” she said.
“Perhaps we could fire point-blank.”
“Fire? Oh, I see. Yes. Yes, I must try, mustn’t I?”
“If you please.”
Her eyes never left Alleyn’s face. “It’s about—” she began and her voice resentfully indicated the presence of Mr. Fox. “It’s about me?”
“Yes?”
“Yes. I’m afraid I must be terribly frank. Or no. Why do I say that? To you of all people who, of course, understand—” she executed a circular movement of her arm—“everything. I know you do. I wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t known. And you see I have Nowhere to Turn.”
“Oh, surely!”
“No. I mean that,” she said with great intensity. “I mean it. Nowhere. No one. It’s all so utterly unexpected. Everything seemed to be going along quite naturally and taking the inevitable course. Because—I know you’ll agree with this—one shouldn’t—indeed one can’t resist the inevitable. One is fated and when this new thing came into our lives we both faced up to it, he and I, oh, over and over again. It’s like,” she rather surprisingly added, “Anthony and Cleopatra. I forget the exact line. I think, actually, that in the production it was cut but it puts the whole thing in a nutshell, and I told him so. Ah, Cleopatra,” she mused, and such was her beauty and professional expertise that, there and then, lying (advantageously of course) on her sofa she became for a fleeting moment the Serpent of the old Nile. “But now,” she added crossly as she indicated a box of cigarettes that was not quite within her reach, “now, with him turning peculiar and violent like this I feel I simply don’t know him. I can’t cope. As I told you on the telephone, I’m terrified.”