“Why did you do that?” Phoebe asked.
Jonas was unlocking the door on the driver’s side. “Wedding presents,” he said, “for our new mummy, when Daddy bethought himself to marry again.”
Phoebe was not sure if she was meant to laugh. “And did she like them, your stepmother?”
“Scoffed the lot. You should have heard her crack those ants between her little pearly teeth.”
James climbed into the narrow back seat while Jonas took the wheel, with Phoebe beside him. They roared off in a cloud of tire smoke. Phoebe was aware of her heart madly beating. What was she thinking of, how had she dared?
In Northumberland Road the tree-lined pavements were dappled with late gold, and midges in clouds bobbed and rose like bubbles in a champagne glass. Jonas slewed the car in at the gate almost without slowing, making the gravel fly, and drew to a bucking stop beside the front steps.
As they walked up to the door, James lagged behind again, to have another look at her, Phoebe felt sure. A phrase came to her, drawing up the rear, and she smiled somewhat bleakly to herself. Would she tell David about this exploit she had allowed herself to be taken on? She thought not. She could imagine the look he would give her, out of those liquid brown eyes of his, with his head skeptically tilted and his chin tucked in.
The hall was cool. A seething patch of sunlight from the open doorway settled briefly on the parquet. “Welcome to the House of Usher,” Jonas said gaily, and James did another of his snorting laughs. Phoebe, despite herself, rather liked the idea of being the menaced innocent in a gothic tale. A red-haired maid, young, with thick ankles, appeared at the other end of the hall and, seeing Phoebe with the twins, gave a sardonic half grin and withdrew to wherever she had come from. “The staff, as you see,” Jonas said, “lack a certain polish.” He made a deep bow, with an arm extended. “This way to the funhouse, ladies and gents!”
The drawing room glowed with greenish light from the garden. Phoebe noted the vast white sofa, the Mainie Jellett on the wall behind it, the sideboard with bottles, cut-glass decanters, a soda siphon. There was a big bunch of red and yellow roses in a china bowl on the table.
“A drink,” Jonas said, making for the sideboard. “My dear, what will you take?”
Phoebe hesitated. Should she drink? Probably not. “Gin,” she said firmly. “I’d like a gin and tonic.”
“That’s my girl! James, be a dear and fetch some ice from the kitchen. And see if there’s a lime, will you?” He grinned at Phoebe. “Lemons are so common, don’t you think?”
Phoebe walked to the window and stood looking into the garden. She was conscious of herself as a figure there, as if she were posing for her portrait. Young Woman by a Window. She had grown up in a house like this, not so large or luxuriously appointed, but with the same hushed air, the same high ceilings, the same fragrance of roses and floor polish. Here, though, there was something else. What was it? The faintest hint of something sickly, as in a room where lately an invalid had lived, that even the musky scent of the roses could not mask.
James came back with the ice, lobbing a lime high into the air and catching it expertly in his palm with a small sharp smack.
“By the way,” Jonas said, plopping ice cubes into Phoebe’s glass and handing it to her, “we were questioned by the rozzers-did you know?”
She thought at first he was making a joke, but decided he was not. “No,” she said carefully. “What did they want to ask you about?”
“Yes,” he said, ignoring her question, “the good old third degree. Shall we sit?”
They took to the sofa, with Phoebe perched in the middle, Jonas lounging to her right, and James sitting a little too close to her on the left. Now that she was seeing them properly and had a chance to study them, she realized that far from being identical they were in fact entirely distinct. The circumstance of looking so alike might be no more than an ingenious piece of mimicry, the putting on of a kind of camouflage behind which they could hide in order to spy on the world. Jonas was the brighter of the two. He was clever and quick, and funny in a brittle sort of way, while James, with that laugh and that air of avid anticipation, was distinctly alarming. Yet if she were to be afraid of them, she knew, it was Jonas who would frighten her the most.
“It was just like in the movies,” Jonas was saying now. “They took us downstairs, to the basement, and put us in separate cells, so we wouldn’t be able to coordinate our stories, and asked us all kinds of things.” He nodded at her glass. “Need some more ice?”
She shook her head. “What kinds of things did they ask?”
“Oh, silly stuff. It was that pal of your dad’s, Inspector-what’s it?”
“Hackett?” she said, surprised.
At the name, for some reason James, on her other side, laughed. She thought of the monkey house at the zoo.
“Yes, that’s it,” Jonas said. “Hackett. Good name for a detective. Bit of a rough diamond. Country cute, I’ll grant you, but not what you’d call bright. Can you tell me now, young lad, ” he said, doing an uncannily close imitation of Hackett’s tone and accent, “ where you were on the night of the full moon, and can you produce a witness to prove it? ” He smiled at her, and his voice sank to a purr. “That would be you, my dear. Our witness.”
“Me?”
“Yes. At Breen’s place, the night of the party. I told you already.”
“Why did he want to know where you were? Why that night?”
The brothers glanced at each other. Jonas laughed. “Because, my dear, that was the night Jack Clancy fell out of his boat and drowned.”
She looked away. Yes; yes, of course.
Abruptly Jonas sprang up from the sofa. “Music,” he said. “Let’s have some music.”
At the other end of the room there was a radiogram, a great mahogany brute standing on four little braced peglike legs. Jonas opened wide the cabinet doors and leaned down to read the spines of the record sleeves. “Eeny meeny miney mo,” he murmured, and extracted an album, “catch old Frankie by the toe!” He turned, showing the record cover with its stylized portrait of the singer-the hat, the cigarette-standing in a melancholy mood on a street corner at night. “Frankie-boy,” he said, “every bobby-soxer’s damp dream. Here we go.” He took out the disc and put it on the turntable. There was a faint hiss and then came the first plinking notes of the tune picked out against a soupy orchestral background. Jonas struck a pose, head back, nostrils flared, his arms encircling an invisible partner, then danced a sweeping step or two, singing along with the record. Phoebe could feel James beside her laughing without sound. Still singing, Jonas now supplied his own lyrics.
“Where were you, lad, on that fatal evening?
Can you prooooove your whe-ere-abouts?
If I ask Miss Griffin if she saw you
Will she back up your cast-iron al-i-biiieee?”
He danced now in the direction of the sofa, and as he swept past he grabbed Phoebe’s wrist and drew her stumbling to her feet and took her in his arms and waltzed her off around the room at such a pace she felt her feet were hardly touching the floor. His brother, meanwhile, threw himself back on the sofa, clapping his hands and raucously whinnying.
Phoebe, her heart hammering in its cage, saw the room spinning around her. She was dizzy already. She could smell the man who was holding her, his odor a mingling of sweat, cologne, and something else, sharp and sour, a faint acid reek. On the second turn around the room she glimpsed over Jonas’s shoulder the door opening, and someone, a woman, coming in. For a second the woman’s face, slender and pale, was a point of stillness in the general whirl; then Jonas swept on, whirling Phoebe with him. They passed by James, asprawl with his arms stretched out at either side along the back of the sofa, watching her with huge enjoyment. Then in rapid succession came the window, the sideboard, the sofa and James seated, the Jellett abstract, and then the woman again, in the doorway.