Dorothy Cannell - The Importance of Being Ernestine

“You’re the man in the café. You were sitting at a table by the window reading, or pretending to read a newspaper.”

“So what if I was?”

“Just being chatty, that’s always her way.” Mrs. Malloy draped a comradely arm around my shoulder.

“You shut your gob, tiger lady, or I’ll have you stuffed and hung on a wall.” He had stopped twitching his feet and held the gun steady. “Now you two dames hear me good and clear. You’re to get hold of your boss on the double and give him a message from me. He’s to tell old Lady Crumb Cake she needs to stop making up stories or someone will see she’s locked up in the loony bin and stays there. If he don’t he’ll be just one other P. I. that doesn’t show up for business as usual.”

“Could you give us your business card?” I was able to be flippant because I was sure now he wasn’t going to kill us, unless we were stupid enough to follow him down the stairs and try to get the license plate number if he made off in a car. Although surely any self-respecting thug would know enough to melt into the shadows before hopping aboard public transportation or slipping into a waiting vehicle. I continued to muse along these lines when the door closed behind him and for several moments after his footsteps faded into silence. Of course I knew what Mrs. Malloy was about to say before she opened her mouth.

“That puts the case in a different light. Someone who isn’t Flossie Jones seems to be up to tricks. And something’s got to be done about it. You can’t get away from that now, Mrs. H.”

The moon huddled behind a threadbare blanket of cloud. It was no longer raining, but the wind shook the trees as if intent on rattling some sense into their leafless heads. It was well after midnight when I dropped Mrs. Malloy off at her house in Herring Street close to the center of Chitterton Fells. And I did so without making any promises. Wasn’t it enough that I had allowed her to talk me out of contacting the police in regard to the man we called Have Gun Will Travel, on the grounds that Mr. Jugg would not appreciate official interference? Her posture as she went up the path to her front door let me know in no uncertain terms what she thought of my saying I would sleep on the Lady Krumley situation. The wind slammed the front door behind her causing the forsythia bush to cower against the wall.

Feeling exhausted but strung up, I drove on home through the square with its tower clock and jostle of Tudor-style buildings. At the corner of Market Street and Spittle Lane I passed Abigail’s. Shortly after Ben and I were married he had opened it as a restaurant serving fabulous French food. A year or so ago, when he decided he wanted to spend more time writing his cookery books, he had turned the ground floor into a coffee shop and let the upstairs to an elderly man in Edwardian dress with a dusty moustache who specialized in the sale of botanical and ornithological prints. The two businesses complemented each other nicely.

Driving up the Cliff Road I thought about Lady Krumley’s obsession with Flossie Jones’s deathbed curse. Was there some connecting piece of information her ladyship had withheld from Mrs. Malloy and me? Something that would explain the arrival of Have Gun Will Travel? Nudging around a bend in the road I thought about the flower pots thrown at her ladyship’s car. In the new light of things it would seem someone had tried to prevent her from keeping her appointment with Milk Jugg. But Lady Krumley had not turned around and gone home as might have been hoped. Presumably, she had found a place to temporarily deal with her shattered window, making her several hours late in reaching Mucklesby. Was Have Gun responsible for that act of vandalism? Or had someone contacted him afterward to say that Plan A had failed and he was to proceed with Plan B?

The road grew darker as it climbed the cliffs. A spatter of rain hit the car windows and with the sound of the windscreen wipers going irritably into action I became suddenly aware that every bone and muscle in my body ached from the work I had done shifting furniture and lifting boxes in Ben’s study.

Fortunately I was now almost home. St. Anselm’s Church came into sight on my left. The vicarage looked cold and pinched-face in the drizzle. The veiled moon cast an eerie light on the graveyard. Its tombstones had life and movement to them as if they were staggering with excruciating slowness toward me through the tufted grass, which also moved in waves as if to suggest that beneath the ground old bones stirred and stretched and skeletal hands reached upward to claw their way to the surface. Where, I wondered, was Flossie Jones buried.

A moment later I was driving through the gates of Merlin’s Court and parking the car in the old stables. I let myself in through the garden door. In the hall I took off my raincoat and tossed it onto the trestle table. There was, I thought, setting down my handbag, the distinct possibility that Ben would already be in bed and asleep, giving me the whole night to lie awake and worry myself sick rather than face up to our quarrel and get it behind us. If it could be put into the past? Remembering his face when he looked at the new computer I wasn’t overly optimistic. Would Kathleen Ambleforth kill me if I rang her up at this late hour and explained my dilemma and the urgent need for the immediate return of my husband’s old manual typewriter? At a pinch the rest of the stuff could wait until morning.

My hand reached for the phone, but the twin suits of armor standing against the staircase wall suggested by the very blankness of their expressions that I would be making a big mistake in dragging Kathleen away from her hot water bottle. Or worse, I might get the vicar himself on the phone and he-being the dear befuddled soul that he is-would get everything mixed up. A vanload of pews along with the church organ, and possibly the organist herself in flannel nightie and curlers, could show up at my door to be disposed of, causing Ben to accuse me of making a further mess of things.

The kitchen light, along with the ones in the hall, had been on when I came in, and narrow strips of light gleamed beneath the closed doors of the dining room and drawing room. I couldn’t bring myself to look toward the study. But this excess of electricity did not necessarily mean that Ben was still up. He was inclined to be careless about switching off lights. A peek into the drawing room found it empty. When I came out I saw a man winding the grandfather clock that stood in an alcove facing the front door. He had his back to me, but there was no mistaking my cousin Freddy for a madman who broke into people’s houses to make sure that they kept time with Big Ben under the illusion that any discrepancy would permanently disrupt Greenwich Mean Time. Freddy’s straggly ponytail and dangling skull and crossbones earring were always a dead give-away.

“Hi coz!” He shifted his lanky six-foot frame in my direction and stuck his hands in his ragged jeans pockets. “Where did you spring from?”

“I spent the evening with Mrs. Malloy. Where’s Ben?”

“In the study.” Freddy stood tugging at his scroungy-looking beard. “Ellie, I think you’ve made a really big mistake this time.”

“You mean,” my voice trembled, “he’s sitting in there… wallowing?”

“More a case of a man in a trance. I don’t want to be overly pessimistic,” Freddy said, shaking his head so that the earring rattled, “but I’ve got the feeling that it could be a long time before Ben comes out of this. I’ve been sitting with him for an hour or more and he didn’t seem to know I was there.”

“Oh, Freddy!”

“Maybe he’ll snap out of it.” He spoke with a complete absence of conviction. “Perhaps you could exert your feminine wiles, Ellie. Light some candles, put on some soft music, play the pitiful little woman to the hilt. It’s a shame,” Freddy flapped an arm around my shoulders, “that you don’t have some alarming crisis to drop in his lap to make him realize that he can’t let anything come between you.”