Patricia Wentworth - The Fingerprint

Frank leaned back lazily. It was not the first time that he had been the recipient of girlish confidences. After a long apprenticeship with female cousins they no longer embarrassed him.

“I don’t know that I should make a practice of hating them. I have hundreds, and they all mean well.”

He was thinking that if she didn’t know which side her bread was buttered she had better make haste and find out. And then with a touch of cynicism he became aware that she knew very well. There was a soft agitation in her voice as she said,

“Oh, you didn’t think I meant Uncle Jonathan-you couldn’t ! I wouldn’t mind anything from him. He is different.”

“Is he?”

“Of course he is! He doesn’t give me old things, he gives me lovely new ones. He gave me a cheque to buy anything I wanted-real, real money to go into a shop with and buy anything I wanted! And a string of pearls for my birthday! Look at them-I’ve got them on! Aren’t they lovely? And he said this was to be my party as well as Georgina ’s!”

It certainly looked as if Uncle Jonathan was spreading himself. Frank said idly,

“And what about Georgina -is she kind too?”

Mirrie fingered her pearls and looked down at the white frills. She said in a childish voice,

“She is very kind.”

It wasn’t until a good deal later that he arrived at dancing with Georgina Grey. She made a charming hostess and there was a good deal of competition, but in the end he got his dance and enjoyed it. Voice, manner and step were easy, graceful and charming. He remembered Cicely Abbott’s old nurse saying of somebody that everything she did became her. He thought it might have been said of Georgina Grey.

He was prompted to turn the conversation in Mirrie’s direction.

“Anthony tells me she has lately come to live with you.”

Georgina said, “To stay with us.” And then, “I think she will stay on.”

“She was telling me that she would have liked to go in for ballet.”

“Yes, but it has been left too late.”

“She dances very well.”

“Oh, yes. But ballet is quite a different thing. You have to start when you are about seven, or even earlier, and it means hours of practice every day for years.”

“I suppose it does.”

He was struck by the serious considering note in her voice. And then they were talking of something else. Mirrie Field as a topic didn’t crop up again.

One thing he did see which he was to remember afterwards. Everyone was breaking off and streaming in to supper. He had Cicely Hathaway as a partner, and just as they were nicely settled she said that she had lost her handkerchief. She knew just where it would be, and he went back for it- “The study, Frank. Grant and I were in there and I was doing my face. It’s one Gran gave me, with real lace.” He found it easily enough, and then as he stood with it in his hand he heard a small tapping sound from the direction of the window. He pushed Cicely’s handkerchief into his pocket and drew back the nearest curtain. It was the one which screened a glass door on to the terrace. The door was ajar and the sound which he had heard was the sound of it just touching the jamb and swinging out again. But as he drew the curtain back it was opened by something more tangible than the wind. Mirrie Field stood on the step in her white dress, staring up at him with her eyes quite wide with fright.

She said, “Oh!” and put her hand to her throat.

Well, girls did slip out at a dance, though it was a pretty cold night for that fluffy white dress. But where was the man? You don’t go out alone into icy gardens. At least if you do, it is sheer lunacy.

He said, “I’m so sorry I gave you a start. Come along and have hot soup. You must be frozen.”

Mirrie went on looking at him.

“I-I was hot-I just went out.”

They went back into the dining-room together. He didn’t think of it again until quite a long time afterwards.

IT WAS an agreeable week-end. Frank and Anthony walked over to Abbottsleigh in the afternoon, and went on to have tea with Grant and Cicely Hathaway, after which Anthony returned to Field End and Frank Abbott went on to town by train from Lenton. The infamous Cressington case broke next day, and he became too much occupied with it to have time or thought for anything else until, as suddenly and dreadfully as it had begun, it ended and the Yard could breathe again. Chief Inspector Lamb lost a stone in weight, a fact which he resented though he could do very well without it. What annoyed him more was that he had lost his sleep, a thing so unusual as to have the most unhappy effect upon his temper. Frank emerged from the affair with a good deal of kudos and the knowledge that he had probably been as near to death as he ever would be until he actually died.

It is curious to reflect that whereas on the stage an actor is within the limits of his own play and is always aware of what kind of play it is-comedy, tragedy, melodrama, or farce-in real life he has no such knowledge and finds himself sliding from one play to another, with the players continually changing, the cues uncertain, and the plot extremely difficult to follow. After a pleasant preliminary scene at Field End in what appeared to be drawing-room comedy the Cressington case was stark melodrama. Frank had left one theatre and been hurried on to the boards in another. But the Field End play went on without him.

Maggie Bell comes into the story at this point. She had been a cripple ever since a car knocked her down in Deeping village street just before her twelfth birthday. She was now a year or two over thirty, and she had not grown or developed very much since what she always spoke of with some pride as “my accident.” She could not set her foot to the ground, and she never went out. But that was not to say that she did not know all about everything that went on in Deeping and its surroundings. Her main sources of information were three. She lay all day on a couch drawn up to the window in the front room over Mr. Bisset’s Grocery Stores, the name imposed by its owner, an ambitious little man, upon what had started life as a general shop. In addition to the Groceries of the title Mr. Bisset sold overalls, strong boots, lads’ and men’s, vegetables and fruit in season, jams and preserves concocted by Mrs. Bisset, together with the liquorice bootlaces once popular but now extinct in most parts of England. Mrs. Bisset produced them from a recipe of which she boasted that it had come down in her family for two hundred years and during that time had never been imparted to anyone who was not a blood relation. On the days when she was concocting this delicacy the smell would penetrate not only to the two rooms rented by Mrs. Bell, but would pervade the village street for some fifty yards in either direction, which, as Mrs. Bisset remarked, was as good an advertisement as you could have.

Sooner or later everyone shopped at the Grocery Stores, even what Mrs. Bell called the County, since it may happen, to anyone to run out of hairpins, safety pins, knicker elastic, to say nothing of apples, onions, tomatoes, or one of the practically universal breakfast cereals. Whenever it was possible to have her window open Maggie could hear everything that was said on the pavement below, where people would stand and gossip as they came and went. She had the sharpest ears in the county and was proud of the fact. On a fine day she would look out and wave, and nearly everyone would wave back. Mrs. Abbott from Abbottsleigh always did. She would look up and smile ever so nicely. But Miss Cicely, that was Mrs. Grant Hathaway now, she would come running up the stairs with that little Bramble dog of hers and half a dozen magazines and books for Maggie to pass the time with. Clever that Bramble dog was. What they call a dachshund-long body and short legs and ever such a knowing look in his eye. Went with Miss Cicely everywhere, and she’d talk to him just as if he could understand every word.