Josephine Tey - The Singing Sands

‘Yes. Well?’

‘He said it because he was startled.’

‘He certainly sounded surprised.’

‘He was surprised because he knew that there was nothing to write on.’

He lay thinking about this until he fell asleep.

Tad arrived, very washed and shining, before Grant had finished breakfast. His soul was troubled, however, and he had to be coaxed out of a contrite mood (‘Can’t help feeling that I walked out on you, Mr Grant’) before he was any good to anyone. He cheered up at last when he found that there were definite plans for the day.

‘You mean you were serious about window cleaning? I thought it was only a—a sort of figure of speech, maybe. You know: like “I’ll be selling matches for a living if this goes on.” Why am I going to clean Lloyd’s windows?’

‘Because it is the only honest way of getting a foot inside the house. My colleagues can prove that you have no right to read a gas-meter, or test the electricity, or the telephone. But they cannot deny that you are a window-cleaner and are legally and professionally getting on with your job. Richards—your boss for today—says that Lloyd goes out nearly every day about eleven, and he is going to take you there when Lloyd has gone. He’ll stay with you and work with you, of course, so that he can introduce you as his assistant who is learning the trade. That way you will be accepted without suspicion and left alone.’

‘So I’m left alone.’

‘On the desk in the big room that occupies most of the first floor there is an engagement book. A large, very expensive, red-leather affair. The desk is a table one—I mean that it doesn’t shut—and it stands just inside the middle window.’

‘So?’

‘I want to know Lloyd’s engagements for the 3rd and 4th of March.’

‘You think maybe he travelled on that train, ’m?’

‘I should like to be sure that he didn’t, anyhow. If I know what his engagements were I can find out quite easily whether he kept them or not.’

‘Okay. That’s quite easy. I’m looking forward to that window cleaning. I’ve always wondered what I could do when I get too old for flying. I might as well look into the window trade. To say nothing of looking into a few windows.’

He went away, blithe and apparently forgetful that half an hour ago he was ‘lower than a worm’s belly’, and Grant looked round in his mind for any acquaintances that he and Heron Lloyd might have in common. He remembered that he had not yet rung up Marta Hallard to announce his return to town. It might be a little early in the day to break in on Marta’s slumbers, but he would risk it.

‘Oh, no,’ Marta said, ‘you didn’t wake me. I’m half-way through my breakfast and having my daily dose of news. Every day I swear that never again will I read a daily paper, and every morning there is the blasted thing lying waiting for me to open it and every morning I open it. It upsets my digestive juices, and hardens my arteries, and my face falls with a thud and undoes five guineas’ worth of Ayesha’s ministrations in five minutes, but I have to have my daily dose of poison. How are you, my dear? Are you better?’

She listened to his answer without interrupting. One of Marta’s more charming characteristics was her capacity for listening. With most of his other women friends silence meant that they were preparing their next speech and were merely waiting for the next appropriate moment to give utterance to it.

‘Have supper with me tonight. I’ll be alone,’ she said when she had heard about Clune and his recovered health.

‘Make it early next week, can you? How is the play going?’

‘Well, darling, it would be going a lot better if Ronnie would come up-stage now and then and talk to me instead of to the audience. He says it emphasises the detachment of the character to practically stamp on the floats and let the front stalls count his eyelashes, but I think myself it’s just a hangover from his music-hall days.’

They discussed both Ronnie and the play for a little, and then Grant said: ‘Do you know Heron Lloyd, by the way?’

‘The Arabia man? Not to say know; no. But I understand he’s almost as much of a hogger as Ronnie.’

‘How?’

‘Rory—my brother’s boy—was mad to go exploring in Arabia—though why anyone should want to go exploring in Arabia I can’t imagine—all dust and dates—anyway, Rory wanted to go with Heron Lloyd, but it seems that Lloyd travels only with Arabs. Rory, who is a nice child, says that that is because Lloyd is so Arabian that he is plus royaliste que le roi , but I think myself—being a low-minded creature and a rogue and vagabond—that he is just suffering from Ronnie’s trouble and wants the whole stage.’

‘What is Rory doing now?’ Grant asked, skating away from Heron Lloyd.

‘Oh, he’s in Arabia. The other man took him. Kinsey-Hewitt. Oh, yes, Rory wouldn’t be put off by a little thing like a snub. Can you make it Tuesday: the supper?’

Yes, he would make it Tuesday. Before Tuesday he would be back at work, and the matter of Bill Kenrick, who had come to England full of excitement about Arabia and had died as Charles Martin in a train going to the Highlands, would have to be put behind him. He had only a day or two more.

He went out to have a hair-cut, and to think in that relaxed hypnotic atmosphere of anything that they had left undone. Tad Cullen was lunching with his boss. ‘Richards won’t accept anything for this,’ he had said to Tad, ‘so take him out to lunch and give him a thundering good one and I’ll pay for it.’

‘I’ll take him out all right and be glad to,’ Tad said, ‘but I’m damned if I’ll let you pay for it. Bill Kenrick was my buddy, not yours.’

So he sat in the warm, aromatic air of the barber’s shop, half dive half clinic, and tried to think of something that they could still do to find Bill Kenrick’s suitcases. But it was the returning Tad who provided the suggestion.

Why, said Tad, not Agony-advertise for this girl.

‘What girl?’

‘The girl who has his luggage. She has no reason to be shy—unless she’s been helping herself to the contents, which wouldn’t be unknown. But Bill is a—was a better picker than that. Why don’t we say in capital letters: “BILL KENRICK”—to catch the eye, get it? — and then just: “Any friend get in touch with Number what’s-it.” Is there anything against that?’

No, Grant could think of nothing against that, but his eye was on the piece of paper that Tad was fishing from his pocket.

‘Did you find the book?’

‘Oh, yes. I had only to lean in and pick it up. That guy doesn’t do any homework, it seems. It’s the dullest list of engagements outside a prison. Not a gardenia from start to finish. And no good to us anyway.’

‘No good?’

‘He was busy, it seems. Will I write out that advertisement for the papers?’

‘Yes, do. There’s paper in my desk.’

‘Which papers shall we send it to?’

‘Write six, and we can address them later.’

He looked down at Tad’s child-like copy of the entries in Lloyd’s engagement book. The entries for the 3rd and 4th of March. And as he read them the full absurdity of his suspicions came home to him. What was he thinking of? Was his mind still the too-impressionable mind of a sick man? How could he ever have dreamed that Heron Lloyd could possibly have been moved to murder? Because that was what he had been thinking, wasn’t it? That somehow, in some way that they could not guess, Lloyd had been responsible for Bill Kenrick’s death.

He looked at the crucial entries, and thought that even if it were proved that Lloyd had not kept these particular engagements it would be fantastic to read into that absence any more than the normal explanation: that Lloyd had been indisposed or had changed his mind. On the night of the 3rd he had apparently attended a dinner. ‘Pioneer Society, Normandie, 7.15’ the entry read. At 9.30 the following morning a Pathé Magazine film unit were due to arrive at 5 Britt Lane and make him into number something-or-other of their Celebrities At Home series. It would seem that Heron Lloyd had more important things to think of than an unknown flyer who claimed to have seen ruins in the sands of Arabia.