Lee, pushed him away.
“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that!”
“Well, Rush may have an alibi, but I haven’t. I went and mooned in the Park, and there I hatched a perfectly monstrous idea, and I want to talk to Lucinda about it, so come along.”
Lucy Craddock looked up as they came in.
“Do you know, I think I was almost asleep. Not quite, you know, but very, very nearly.”
Peter brought a footstool and sat down upon it with his arms around his knees and his head tilted a little so that he could look at her. Lee went over to the window and stood there staring out. People passing, the glint of the low sun upon the bit of the river which you could just see between the trees, the smoky blue of the sky, and a piled cloud or two that looked like thunder. It was turning very hot again, but her hands and feet were cold, and something inside her was very much afraid. There was no end to the dreadfulness, no end at all. Peter said,
“Lucinda, do you think you could come over all reminiscent and chatty?”
Lucy Craddock fluttered.
“My dear boy-of course-if there is anything you want to know-”
Peter hugged his knees.
“There is. I want to have a nice heart-to-heart gossip about Aggie Crouch-Rosalie La Fay -Ross’s wife. I want you to spread yourself.”
“But, my dear, I know so little. Mary and I were naturally most interested, but poor John was so much upset that he only told us the barest facts, and his wife refused to talk about it at all.”
“Now, Lucinda, don’t tell me that you and Mary just sat down under that. After all the lady was a public character. Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t go out into the highways and byways and-well, glean?”
Lucy Craddock bridled.
“Oh, my dear boy, that sounds as if we were two inquisitive old maids!”
“Why shouldn’t one be inquisitive? I am, desperately, about Aggie-Rosalie-Craddock. What did you find out?”
“Very little,” said Lucy in a regretful voice. “Mary thought if we went to the theatrical agencies;-but we didn’t know their names of course, so we-we-well, my dear boy, we employed someone.”
Peter’s eyes danced for a moment.
“A detective? Oh, Lucinda!”
Lucy blushed.
“Oh, no, indeed-a private inquiry agent-discretion guaranteed-really quite a gentlemanly man. And all he found out was that she had a sister married to a corn-chandler in Hoxton, and that there was nothing against either of their characters-which of course was very disappointing.”
Peter roared with laughter.
“Lucinda, you’re a jewel!”
“Oh but-my dear boy-I didn’t mean that at all. I mean-well, of course one wouldn’t have wanted her to have done anything dreadful, but of course after all that trouble and expense-well, you know what I mean.”
“Perfectly,” said Peter. “And was that all?”
“Except the photographs,” said Lucy Craddock in an abstracted voice. “Now I wonder whether dear Mary kept the photographs.”
“I should think,” said Peter out of a bitter experience, “that Mary always kept everything.”
“They were in a yellow cardboard box, tied up with the ribbon from a most beautiful box of chocolates which John gave us for Christmas that year. I remember Mary wouldn’t put them in the chocolate box because she said it was too good for pictures of Aggie Crouch, so she used it for her handkerchiefs.”
Peter’s pulses jumped.
Gosh! Suppose he had burned those photographs. He hadn’t, but just suppose he had.
A drop of cold perspiration ran down his spine. He said in a difficult, halting voice,
“The bulging yellow box-in the bottom of the wardrobe?”
Lucy nodded.
“Yes, that’s where they’ll be, if she kept them-and she always kept everything.”
Peter got up, looked at Lee’s back, looked at the door, and without a word rushed out of the room and out of the flat.
Lucy stared after him in mild surprise, but Lee never turned round. She hardly knew he had gone, so far had she withdrawn from what was going on in the room.
And then Peter came back. He had the box in his hands-an aged, battered affair with one side gaping. And he was thinking that very likely this old battered box held two people’s lives-Bobby Foster’s life and-better not think about the other-better just keep on thinking about Bobby. He came across the room with an odd eager look on his face, plumped down on his stool again, and set the cardboard box across Lucy Craddock’s knees.
Lee turned round from the window and came slowly over to them. She knelt down by Lucy’s chair and sat back upon her heels. The feeling that something was going to happen was so strong that for the moment she had neither words, nor breath to say them with.
“Yes, that is it. I felt sure that Mary would have kept it-she always kept everything.”
Peter said, “Yes, she did,” in rather too heart-felt a tone. Then he untied the ribbon and pulled the lid off the box. A mass of small photographs cascaded into Lucy’s lap. She contemplated them in a slightly bewildered manner and said,
“Oh dear me-all the other photographs seem to be in here too. I wonder when Mary did that.”
She picked up a faded carte-de-visite which showed a little, round-faced girl with straight hair taken back under a comb, a skirt with a lot of frills, and a tiny apron with two pockets.
“Dear Mary at the age of six,” she said in a tenderly reminiscent voice.
Lee got her breath.
“Oh! It’s exactly like Alice in Wonderland-even the striped stockings!”
Lucy Craddock nodded.
“I think they are very pretty. And this is our father and mother taken on their wedding trip. I never remember him without a beard, and of course that makes a man look so much older, but here you see he has only those little mutton-chop whiskers, and I always think they were so very becoming. And this is my great aunt Sabina. Goodness-how frightened we were of her! You can see she looks very severe. She was so stout that she hardly ever got out of her chair, but she kept a strong ebony stick with an ivory knob beside her, and we used to be dreadfully afraid if we made a noise or did something she didn’t like that one day she would come after us, all huge and angry with the black stick tapping.”
“Definitely a menace,” said Peter. “Now, Lucinda, fascinating as these reminiscences are, we haven’t time for them just now. Let us have the life histories of our relations when we are not all expecting to be arrested. The only relation I feel I can give my mind to at the moment is Aggie Crouch.”
“Oh, my dear boy-not a relation!” protested Lucy Craddock in a horrified voice.
Peter looked at her reprovingly.
“My first cousin by marriage, Lucinda. Yours and Lee’s a little farther off, but still definitely connected. Anyhow, I want you to concentrate on her and her photographs. Have we got to sort through all this lot to find them, or are they by themselves?”
Lucy Craddock looked quite shocked.
“Oh, by themselves-dear Mary would never have mixed them up with our relations. I think at the very bottom of the box, in one of those thin light-coloured envelopes.”
Peter turned the whole box over. A full-sized cabinet photograph of great-uncle Henry Albert Craddock slid unnoticed to the floor, aunts and cousins overflowed into the seat of the chair. The light, thin envelope wavered upon the top of the pile. Peter picked it up and read an endorsement in faded ink:
“Photographs of Ross’s wife under her stage name of Rosalie La Fay.”