Patricia Wentworth - She Came Back

“Since I was in France, darling. Quite a good place to learn, don’t you think?”

The little scene left a flavour behind it-the kind of flavour which is hardly there but lingers on the palate. For the rest, things would go more easily than at Jocelyn’s Holt. They would not have to sit alone together in a horrid travesty of the solitude à deux. There was nearly always work to be finished at home. He could bring a man back with him. Anne could see her friends. She was busy ringing people up, asking one to lunch, another to tea-picking up the threads which had been dropped nearly four years ago. These activities were a great relief to Philip. The fuller Anne’s life was, the less strain was placed on their relationship. The last thing he desired was the concentration of thought and interest upon himself or upon his work. That the latter was highly confidential and could not afford a meeting-ground hardly affected the position, since he would in any case have kept the door locked upon his private affairs.

Unfortunately Anne did not appear to see this. He could imagine her having been brought up on the simple axiom, “Always talk to men about their work-they like it.” From what he had ever heard of her mother, she was just the sort of woman to say just that sort of thing. He was forced at last into a blunt,

“I can’t talk about my job-and anyhow it would bore you stiff.”

She looked a shade reproachful.

“It wouldn’t-really. But-do you mean-it’s-secret?”

She saw him frown. He controlled his voice to say,

“Most staff work is confidential. Anyhow I’m at it all day- I wouldn’t want to talk about it if it was as public as Hyde Park.”

“I thought men liked to talk about their work.”

He turned a sheet of the Times and made no answer.

That was the first evening in the flat. It was also the evening on which Nellie Collins did not come home.

Mrs. Smithers rang up the police in the morning.

“My landlady, Miss Collins-she hasn’t come home. I really don’t know what to make of it at all.”

In the police station Sergeant Brown, a family man, employed a soothing voice.

“How long has she been gone?”

“Since yesterday afternoon!” said Mrs. Smithers in an angry voice. “Most inconsiderate and uncalled for-leaving me alone in the house like this! And her shop not opened, and not my business to open it of course, nor yet to take in the milk, only being war-time, I couldn’t be expected to let it go to waste!”

Sergeant Brown said, “No.” And then, “Just when did you say Miss Collins left?”

“Early yesterday afternoon. Went off in her best coat and skirt, and told me she was going up to meet a friend. Nothing about not coming back, or hoping it wouldn’t put me out if she stayed in town-nothing like that! And here it’s ten o’clock, and not a word to say where she is or when she’s coming back, and I don’t consider it’s treating me right!”

Mrs. Smithers sounded so much annoyed that Sergeant Brown found himself saying the word “accident.”

“She may have met with an accident.”

“Then why can’t she say so?” said Mrs. Smithers in a tearing temper.

By the time that Sergeant Brown hung up the receiver he was feeling a little sorry for Miss Collins. She was going to need something very substantial in the way of an accident if she wished to placate Mrs. Smithers. He began to ring up the London hospitals. When none of them knew anything about a middle-aged lady in a bright blue coat and skirt and a black hat with a bunch of blue flowers on it, he rang up Scotland Yard.

Miss Silver was accustomed to feel very piously and sincerely grateful, not only for the success which attended her professional activities, but for the modest comfort which this success had brought her. Part of her gratitude arose from the fact that she regarded it as a privilege to thwart the designs of the evil-doer and to serve the ends of justice, which she would certainly have spelt with a capital letter. Her experience provided many occasions on which through her agency the innocent had been protected and restored. She found a benevolent pleasure in remembering these cases. Garth and Janice Albany had figured in one of them.

On the day after her expedition to Blackheath Miss Silver was sitting by a neat, bright fire in her flat in Montague Mansions. She had almost finished the stocking for Johnny Burkett which she had been knitting in the train on the previous day. As soon as this pair was completed she would begin another, since she had promised her niece Ethel three pairs before Christmas. So extremely fortunate that she had laid in a good stock of this useful wool before the coupon system came in. Not that she had expected anything of the sort-oh, dear me, no-but she remembered only too well the alarming price of knitting-wool during and immediately after the last war, and had accordingly taken precautions. She could therefore make herself responsible for Johnny’s stockings without feeling that she was robbing his brothers, Derek and little Roger, who would also be requiring footwear for the winter.

As she knitted she regarded her room with satisfaction. Very comfortable, very tasteful, very cosy. The prevailing colour was that shade of blue known to the period of Miss Silver’s youth as peacock. The plush curtains, which had cleaned so well and which she had not yet drawn; the carpet which had been turned round so as to bring the worn piece under the bookcase; the upholstery upon the Victorian chairs with their curly walnut legs-all partook of this shade. The big workmanlike desk with its two rows of drawers was of the same shiny yellow wood as the chairs, the colour being again repeated in the maple frames of the engravings which decorated the walls-Bubbles, The Soul’s Awakening, The Black Brunswicker, The Monarch of the Glen. A further selection of these Victorian favourites adorned her bedroom, monotony being avoided by an occasional interchange between the two rooms. Upon the mantelpiece, upon the top of the book-case, and upon a table between the two windows, stood innumerable photographs, most of them framed either in silver or in silver filigree upon plush. There were a great many babies, a good many young mothers, a great many little boys and girls, with here and there a tall young man in uniform- some of them relations, but many of them the people she had helped in her service of Justice and the children who might never have been born if it had not been for that service. It was not only a portrait gallery; it was a record of achievement.

Miss Silver herself, in indoor dress, was seen to possess a good deal of mouse-coloured hair, very neatly plaited at the back and arranged in front in the high curled fringe coming down in a point between the eyebrows popularized by the late Queen Alexandra. After more than thirty years of obsolescence it had some ten years previously enjoyed a fleeting return, but whether it was in the fashion or out of the fashion Miss Silver continued to do her hair that way, the whole being very competently controlled by an invisible net. For the rest, she wore a dress of olive-green wool made high at the neck by a little vest of tucked net with a collar supported at the sides by slips of whalebone. The skirt was of a decorous length, but it disclosed that Miss Silver’s quite neat ankles and feet were encased in black woollen stockings and slippers with beaded toes, how and whence procured only she herself could have said. The olive-green dress was fastened in front by a brooch of bog oak representing a rose, with a pearl in the middle of it. A fine gold chain supported the pince-nez in occasional use for very fine print, but because the use was only occasional, the glasses themselves were looped up on the left-hand side and secured by an old-fashioned bar brooch set with pearls.