‘Oh, yes?’
At this moment a considerable section of the audience came streaming out and several patrons came in from outside. Dame Beatrice and Laura mounted one long flight of steps and were conducted down another to their seats at the front of the circle. The main feature was entitled: The Ghouls of Dead Man’s Creek.
‘Very suitable,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘At the interval I shall require a choc-ice and a bottle of some obnoxious liquid which I shall imbibe through a straw.’
‘When in Rome, and all that, I suppose,’ said Laura. ‘Sure you wouldn’t like me to dash out for some fish and chips?’
There was a message for Dame Beatrice when they got back to their hotel.
‘Would you please ring your son at his home address, Dame Beatrice?’
Dame Beatrice did so and was told by Ferdinand Lestrange that, at his last remand before the magistrates, Chelion Piper had been released and the police had withdrawn the charges.
‘I don’t know whether you or Cox, Cox, Rufford and Cox have pulled it off,’ said Ferdinand, ‘Congratulations, anyway.’
Chapter Twelve
Discoveries
« ^ »
(1)
MONDAY morning proved to be as frustrating as Saturday had been. The junk shop was still closed. In spite of the card which hung inside the glass-topped door and announced this, Laura hammered on the wooden panels and then tapped with the edge of a coin on the glass, while Dame Beatrice waited in the car.
Laura returned to it to announce that that appeared to be that and to add that the proprietor either had overslept or else took Mondays off as well as Saturdays and, if the girl in the cash desk at the cinema had spoken the truth, some part of Wednesdays also.
‘Anyway, we know he’s about here somewhere,’ Laura went on, ‘because I saw him in the cinema when he popped his head out behind the receptionist. He can’t be far away.’
‘Monday may be his day for prospecting for more items to display in his shop,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘It is not considered by most shopkeepers to be a very good day for trade, I believe. Let us disport ourselves until after lunch as best we may, and return here this afternoon.’
But the afternoon proved equally frustrating. They tried the shop again at two-thirty, at four o’clock and at ten minutes to five, but the notice inside the door was unchanged and Laura’s peering in through the glass produced no information, except that the shop was empty.
‘We will try again tomorrow,’ said Dame Beatrice. Tuesday, however, proved to be another abortive day, so on Wednesday afternoon Laura went back to the cinema on her own to find that the same girl was behind the grille. She seemed disgruntled. She took Laura’s money, pushed over the ticket and the change and then hunched herself on her stool and picked up the magazine she had been reading when Laura had come in. The time was half-past three and Laura and Dame Beatrice had been to the junk shop at ten in the morning and again after lunch. It was still closed.
Laura sat through an hour of the programme and then went down to the vestibule. This time the ticket-office stool was occupied by a large man in evening dress.
‘Oh,’ said Laura, hastily improvising, ‘I believe, when I took my glove off to pay for my ticket, I might have left it on the ledge. Would your cashier have seen it and put it away somewhere? It’s a brown one, like this—’ she produced one of a pair which was in her handbag ‘—and I’ve only just missed it.’
‘I haven’t seen it, madam,’ the man – obviously the manager, from his costume and unctuous deportment – replied after he had leaned over sideways to glance at the floor, ‘but the young lady has only gone off to have a cup of tea. She’ll be back directly, if you’d care to take a seat.’
Laura took one of the gold-painted, uncomfortable little chairs which formed part of the décor of the vestibule and was not kept waiting long. The girl appeared from behind the curtain at the back of the box-office, she and the manager exchanged a word or two – indignant on the one side, mild and soothing on the other – the manager disappeared behind the curtain and the girl slid on to the stool. Laura came forward with her story of the missing glove.
‘You wasn’t wearing gloves when you took your ticket,’ said the girl. ‘You must have dropped it some place else. Perhaps it’s on the floor upstairs where you were sitting.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Laura, ‘I didn’t take anything out of my handbag up there. I asked the man who was taking your place here—’
‘The man who was taking my place here, yes, I don’t think! The man what ought to of been, only he never!’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Never turned up, the old bugger! And me with a date! I ask you! Wednesday afternoon and evening is my time off and I’d got today planned special. Sours on you, don’t it, when you got something all planned out and it don’t come off.’
‘Oh, dear! I’m sorry. Rotten for you. Does this chap often let you down?’
‘No, and better he hadn’t, unless he wants my boyfriend waiting for him one night. He doesn’t like being stood up, my boyfriend doesn’t.’
‘None of them do, but perhaps your relief will still turn up. I hope so, anyway.’
She went back to the hotel and explained the situation to Dame Beatrice, adding that, in her opinion, the junk shop proprietor was either out on the toot of the century or that he had scarpered.
‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘our conversation with Miss Barnes had its own peculiar interest, don’t you think? A pity that, from the doorway of the shop the picture in which I took so much interest is not visible.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean that unless we find some means of entering the shop, we cannot tell whether the picture is still in place.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Probably not.’
‘I expect there’s a back entrance somewhere. Shall I go along and have a look round? There’s probably an alleyway from the street and then another one at right angles to it which runs along the back of the shop.’
‘I hardly think further investigation is called for.’
‘Well, I don’t know so much. It’s a bit peculiar, to say the least, that the shop should still be closed.’
‘Possibly the proprietor is taking his annual holiday.’
‘At this time of year?’
‘He would hardly close his shop during the months the summer visitors are flocking into the town.’
‘If there was another shop next door, perhaps we could ask about him. It’s strange he didn’t let the cinema people know he would be absent.’
‘What makes you so persistent?’ asked Dame Beatrice, gazing at her secretary in some perplexity. Laura shook her head.
‘Those fire-irons, perhaps,’ she said, ‘and the murder and Elysée Barnes and one thing and another.’
‘Then, if it will ease your mind, you had better find this back entrance, if it exists, but please stay on the right side of the law.’
‘I don’t intend breaking and entering, if that’s what you mean.’ Laura waited for no comment upon this declaration. They took the car, and when they reached the junk shop she got out and strode rapidly away down the narrow street. As she disappeared at the right-angled turn, the milkman’s van pulled up outside the shop, the man got down, took a pint bottle from his cargo and was about to place it on the step when he changed his mind and returned it to the van.
‘I was wondering at what time the shop opens,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘Ent he open, then?’
‘It appears not. Neither was the shop open on Saturday or Monday or yesterday.’
‘Must-a-bin. He took the three bottles in all right, else they ud still be here, like, wouldn’t ’em? Nobody don’t pinch milk bottles in this town, you know.‘ He climbed back on to his van and resumed his round. Dame Beatrice went up to the shop door and hammered on it. Then she walked up the little cobbled street in Laura’s wake and met her secretary coming back.