Джозефина Тэй - To Love and Be Wise

And it had better be convenient, blast you, he said in his mind; furious at his racing heart.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said equably. ‘Come in, won’t you. I live upstairs.’

She shut the door behind him and then led him up the wooden stairs to her studio. A strong smell of coffee – good coffee – pervaded the place and as she led him in she said: ‘I’ve just been having my breakfast. I have made a bargain with the paperboy that he should leave a roll for me every morning with the paper, and that is my breakfast. But there is lots of coffee. Will you have some, Inspector?’

They said at the Yard that Grant had two weaknesses: coffee, and coffee. And it smelt wonderful. But he wasn’t going to drink anything with Lee Searle.

‘Thank you, but I have just had mine.’

She poured another cup for herself, and he noticed that her hand was quite steady. Damn the woman, he was beginning to admire her. As a colleague she would be wonderful.

She was a tall woman, and spare; very good-looking in her bony fashion and still quite young. She wore her hair in a thick plait, coronet-wise. The long housecoat she was wearing was made of some dull green stuff, rather like one Marta had; and she had the long legs that helped to give Marta her elegance.

‘Your resemblance to Leslie Searle is remarkable,’ he said.

‘So we have been told,’ she said shortly.

He moved round the room to look at the Scottish pictures that were still propped up on view. They were orthodox impressions of orthodox scenes, but they were painted with a savage confidence, a fury, so that they shouted at one from the canvas. They didn’t present themselves to one, they attacked. ‘Look, I’m Suilven!’ shouted Suilven, looking odder and more individual than even that mountain had ever looked. The Cooling, a grape-blue rampart against a pale morning sky, were a whole barrier of arrogance. Even the calm waters of Kishorn were insolent.

‘Did it stay fine for you?’ Grant asked, and then, feeling that that was too impudent, added: ‘The west of Scotland is very wet.’

‘Not at this time of year. This is the best time.’

‘Did you find the hotels comfortable? I hear they are apt to be primitive.’

‘I didn’t trouble the hotels. I camped out in my car.’

Neat, he thought. Very neat.

‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’

But he was in no hurry. She had caused him a lot of trouble, this woman. He would take his time.

He moved from the pictures to the rows of books on the shelves, and considered the titles.

‘You have a liking for oddities, I see.’

‘Oddities?’

‘Poltergeists. Showers of fish. Stigmata. That sort of thing.’

‘I think all artists are attracted by the odd, whatever their medium, don’t you?’

‘You don’t seem to have anything on transvestism.’

‘What made you think of that?’

‘Then you know the term?’

‘Of course.’

‘It is something that doesn’t interest you?’

‘The literature of the subject is very unsatisfactory, I understand. Nothing between learned pamphlets and News of the World .’

‘You ought to write a treatise on the subject.’

‘ I ?’

‘You like oddities,’ he said smoothly.

‘I am a painter, Inspector, not a writer. Besides, no one is interested nowadays in female pirates.’

‘Pirates?’

‘They were all pirates or soldiers or sailors, weren’t they?’

‘You think the fashion went out with Phoebe Hessel? Oh, by no means. The thing is continually turning up. Only the other day a woman died in Gloucestershire who had worked for more than twenty years hauling timber and coal, and even the doctor who attended her in her last illness had no idea that she was not a man. I knew a case personally, not long ago. A young man was charged in a London suburb with theft. Quite a normal popular young man. Played a good game of billiards, belonged to a men’s club, and was walking out with one of the local beauties. But when medically examined he turned out to be quite a normal young woman. It happens somewhere or other every year or two. Glasgow. Chicago. Dundee. In Dundee a young woman shared a lodging-house ward with ten men and was never questioned. Am I boring you?’

‘Not at all. I was only wondering whether you considered them oddities in the sense that stigmata and poltergeists are.’

‘No; oh, no. Some, of course, are genuinely happier in men’s things; but a great many do it from love of adventure, and a few from economic necessity. And some because it is the only way in which they can work out their schemes.’

She sipped her coffee with polite interest, as one indulging an uninvited guest until he should reach the point of stating what he had come for.

Yes, he thought, she would make a wonderful ally.

His heart had slowed down to its proper rate. These were moves in a game that he had been playing a long time; the game of mind against mind. And now he was interested in her reaction to his moves. She had withstood undermining. How would she stand up to direct attack?

He came away from the bookshelves and said: ‘You were very devoted to your cousin, Miss Searle.’

‘Leslie? But I have already–’

‘No. Marguerite Merriam.’

‘Mar– I don’t know what you are talking about.’

That was a mistake. If she had stopped to think for a moment, she would have realized that there was no reason at all to deny the connection with Marguerite. But the unexpectedness of that name on his lips had startled her, and she had fallen headlong.

‘So devoted that you couldn’t think quite straight about her.’

‘I tell you–’

‘No, don’t tell me anything. I’ll tell you something. Something that ought to make confidences between us quite easy, Miss Searle. I encountered Leslie Searle at a party in Bloomsbury. One of those literary gatherings. He wanted to be introduced to Lavinia Fitch and I agreed to present him. As we pushed through the crowd we were flung together at very close quarters; in fact it was breathing-room only. A policeman is trained to observe, but I think even without that I would have noticed any variation in detail that was presented to me at that range. He had very fine grey eyes, Leslie Searle, and there was a small brown fleck in the iris of the left one. I have lately spent a good deal of time, and a great deal of labour and thought, trying to account for Leslie Searle’s disappearance, and with native wit and considerable luck I got to the stage where I needed only one small thing to make my case complete. A small brown fleck. I found it on the doorstep down there.’

There was complete silence. She was sitting with her coffee cup in her lap, looking down at it. The slow ticking of a wall clock sounded loud and ponderous in the quiet.

‘It’s an odd thing, sex,’ Grant said. ‘When you laughed with me, caught in the crush that day, I had a moment of being suddenly out of countenance. Disconcerted. The way a dog is sometimes when it is laughed at. I knew it had nothing to do with your laughing, and I could not think why else I should have been disconcerted. About 12:45 last Monday I began the process of realizing why; and was nearly run over by a taxi in consequence.’

She had looked up at this; and now she said in a kind of detached interest: ‘Are you the star turn at Scotland Yard?’

‘Oh, no,’ Grant assured her. ‘I come in bundles.’

‘You don’t talk like something out of a bundle. Not any bundles I’ve been acquainted with. And no one out of a bundle could have – could have found out what happened to Leslie Searle.’

‘Oh, I’m not responsible for that.’

‘No? – Who is, then?’

‘Dora Siggins.’