Miss Silver smiled graciously, but with restraint. A truly excellent man, the Chief Inspector, but sometimes just a little inclined to be patronising. At such moments she was apt to, as it were, recede and become the governess again. Lamb may or may not have felt a slight touch of frost upon the air.
Miss Silver coughed, glanced at the paper in her hand, and addressed him.
“Is Miss Jane Heron young?”
He nodded.
“Yes, bit of a girl-mannequin. Not the sort of job I’d like one of my girls to take on, but there’s nothing against her. She and Captain Taverner are said to be sweethearting.”
“I believe that I have met her. Some months ago at a friend’s house. An attractive girl, and quite young.” She spoke in a meditative tone.
Frank Abbott allowed himself to smile.
“There!” he said. “What more do you need? We can’t offer you a murder, but a love affair with a nice girl in an invidious position should really do almost as well.”
Her glance reproved him.
“Murder is much too serious a thing to make jokes about.”
Lamb said, a thought impatiently,
“Well, well, that’s true enough. But there’s no question of murder. Will you do it? Frank here suggests driving you down. He’s got a cousin with a place close by-one of his fancy relations with a handle to his name. He fetches them up like rabbits out of a hat. Beats me where they all come from.”
Frank’s fair eyebrows rose.
“Too easy, sir. My great-grandfather had nineteen children. They all married and had large families.”
Lamb grunted.
“Well, this particular cousin’s name is Challoner-Sir John Challoner, if you please-and he lives not a mile and a half down the road from the Catherine-Wheel. Frank’s idea is-well, he’d better explain it himself.”
Frank Abbott passed a hand over his immaculate hair.
“Well, I drop you at the inn and go on and stay with Jack Challoner. I’m there on the spot quite nice and handy. If you want me you ring up Ledstow 23, and they pass it on, upon which Jack and I drop in for a drink. As far as you’re concerned, I lurk until I’m really sure that you’ve got in. They’ll be pretty full up, and they probably won’t want strangers. On the other hand, if there’s anything illegal going on, they won’t want to draw attention to themselves by repelling the bona fide traveller. Now just how bona fide can we contrive for you to be?”
Miss Silver coughed.
“My dear Frank, there should be no difficulty about that. The truth is always best.”
“The truth?”
Miss Silver smiled benignantly.
“I shall ring the bell and say that a gentleman very kindly gave me a lift and recommended their hotel.”
The Chief Inspector’s eyes bulged a little. Frank permitted himself to laugh.
“And what exactly are you doing getting lifts and arriving after dark at strange hotels? It’s going to look funny, isn’t it?”
Miss Silver beamed.
“I tell the simple truth-I have a professional engagement in the neighbourhood.”
CHAPTER 7
The week between being interviewed by Jacob Taverner and travelling down to Cliff was of a very variable emotional temperature as far as Jeremy and Jane were concerned. It was, in fact, like some of our more versatile weather forecasts, including gales, bright intervals, frost in places, and fog locally. There were some sharp clashes, a major quarrel, a reconciliation which was not without its softer passages. But in the end there was not very much real change in their relations, since Jeremy continued to disapprove of the whole Taverner connection and proposed marriage as an alternative to acquiring what he described as a lot of riffraff cousins and Jane continued to observe with varying degrees of firmness that it wasn’t any good his putting his foot down, that she meant to have her hundred pounds, and that everyone said cousins oughtn’t to marry.
When the Saturday afternoon arrived there was what might be described as a fine interval. Since Jeremy possessed a car known to his friends as The Scarecrow, they were going to drive down to the Catherine-Wheel, and it did seem a pity to waste a fine afternoon quarrelling. As Jane pointed out, Jeremy would probably make himself frightfully disagreeable over the week-end, and there was no point in taking the fine edge off his temper before they got there.
“It would be a pity if you ran out of frowns and things half way through Sunday just through being extravagant with them now.”
Jeremy said briefly that he wasn’t in the least likely to run out, after which he suddenly burst out laughing, kissed her before she had time to stop him, and informed her that he would probably be the life and soul of the party.
“Wait till you see me putting down cocktails in the bar with dear Geoffrey and our attractive cousin Al! When I’m well and truly lit I shall make love to Call-me-Floss. When just on the edge of passing out I may even get as far as whispering rude nothings in dear Mildred’s maiden ear. I say, what do you think she’d do if I really did?”
“Drop her bag and blush a deep pure puce.”
“Well, you watch me!”
Jane giggled.
“You’d better watch yourself. Either Mildred or Floss might feel that they’d like to get about and see places with the Army.”
They were driving down the Great West Road. A pale winter sun shone overhead. The sky was turquoise blue, the air fresh without being cold. Jeremy took his left hand from the wheel and flicked Jane lightly on the cheek.
“I shall be protected by our engagement.”
“We’re not engaged.”
“Darling, you can’t refuse to protect me. There shall be no misunderstanding. We shall advance hand-in-hand into the bar and announce that we are affianced. The clan will then drink our health in bumpers of synthetic port, after which we shall all expire, the family ghost appearing when we are at the last gasp to mutter, ‘You had been warned.’ ”
Jane put her chin in the air, but the corners of her mouth quivered.
“We are not affianced. And if it’s going to be fatal as quickly as that-”
“Darling, I have a plan. We will pour the lethal draught on to the aspidistra, then everyone else will expire, and we will run the family pub. What shall we do with it? It’s had a shady past, so I think we might give it a decorated future. What shall it be-a gambling hell, or a dope den?”
Jane said primly, “I was very nicely brought up. I once got a good conduct prize. It was a bowdlerized edition of The Vicar of Wakefield with all the bits about lovely woman stooping to folly cut out. I think we’d better make it a tea-garden.”
“Jane, you can’t have tea in a garden in England-at least hardly ever.”
“You don’t. You have a sort of leaky verandah-only it sounds better if you call it a loggia. The rain drips down your neck and the earwigs get into your tea, but it gives you a nice out-for-the-day sort of feeling, and if the cakes are really good, you just can’t keep people away. I make frightfully good cakes. Gramp said I had a natural aptitude. He said I’d inherited it from his mother who was the world’s best cook. He made me have really good lessons.”
Jeremy took his hand off the wheel again. It caught hers and held it in an ecstatic clasp.
“When can we be married? I can’t wait. I knew that you were lovely and talented, but what’s that to the solid worth of a really good cook?”
They went on talking nonsense very comfortably.
The daylight was fading when they passed through Ledlington and took the long flat road out of it which runs through Ledstow to the coast. It is a seven mile stretch, but the old coast road takes off just short of Ledstow and bears away to the right. It is quite easy to overshoot it, because it isn’t much used and the trees have grown in and made it narrow. After a mile the ground rises. There are no more trees, and the hedges are low and bent by the wind off the sea. Cliff is quite a small village, and very few trains stop there. That the railway passes it at all is due to the fact that the land was Challoner property, and at the time the railway was built Sir Humphrey Challoner was someone to be reckoned with. He had married an heiress. And he represented Ledlington in Parliament.