Spinsters in Jeopardy

DEDICATION

For Anita and Val Muling with my thanks

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Cast of Characters

Prologue

1. Journey to the South

2. Operation Truebody

3. Morning with Mr Oberon

4. The Elusiveness of Mr Garbel

5. Ricky in Roqueville

6. Consultation

7. Sound of Ricky

8. Ricky Regained

9. Dinner in Roqueville

10. Thunder in the Air

11. P.E. Garbel

12. Eclipse of the Sun

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About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Prologue

Without moving his head, Ricky slewed his eyes round until he was able to look slantways at the back of his mother’s easel.

‘I’m getting pretty bored, however,’ he announced.

‘Stick it a bit longer, darling, I implore you, and look at Daddy.’

‘Well, because it’s just about as boring a thing as a person can have to do. Isn’t it Daddy?’

‘When I did it,’ said his father, ‘I was allowed to look at your mama, so I wasn’t bored. But as there are degrees of boredom,’ he continued, ‘so there are different kinds of bores. You might almost say there are recognizable schools.’

‘To which school,’ said his wife, stepping back from her easel, ‘would you say Mr Garbel belonged? Ricky, look at Daddy for five minutes more and then I promise we’ll stop.’

Ricky sighed ostentatiously and contemplated his father.

‘Well, as far as we know him,’ Alleyn said, ‘to the epistolatory school. There, he’s a classic. In person he’s undoubtedly the sort of bore that shows you things you don’t want to see. Snapshots in envelopes. Barren conservatories. Newspaper cuttings. He’s relentless in this. I think he carries things on his person and puts them in front of you without giving you the smallest clue about what you’re meant to say. You’re moving, Ricky.’

‘Isn’t it five minutes yet?’

‘No, and it never will be if you fidget. How long is it, Troy, since you first heard from Mr Garbel?’

‘About eighteen months. He wrote for Christmas. All told I’ve had six letters and five postcards from Mr Garbel. This last arrived this morning. That’s what put him into my head.’

‘Daddy, who is Mr Garbel?’

‘One of Mummy’s admirers. He lives in the Maritime Alps and writes love letters to her.’

‘Why?’

‘He says it’s because he’s her third cousin once removed, but I know better.’

‘What do you know better?’

With a spare paint-brush clenched between her teeth, Troy said indistinctly:‘Keep like that, Ricky darling, I implore you.’

‘OK. Tell me properly, Daddy, about Mr Garbel.’

‘Well, he suddenly wrote to Mummy and said Mummy’s great-aunt’s daughter was his second cousin, and that he thought Mummy would like to know that he lived at a place called Roqueville in the Maritime Alps. He sent a map of Roqueville, marking the place where the road he lived in ought to be shown, but wasn’t, and he told Mummy how he didn’t go out much or meet many people.’

‘Pretty dull, however.’

‘He told her about all the food you can buy there that you can’t buy here and he sent her copies of newspapers with bus timetables marked and messages at the side saying: ‘I find this bus convenient and often take it. It leaves the corner by the principal hotel every half-hour.’ Do you still want to hear about Mr Garbel?’

‘Unless it’s time to stop, I might as well.’

‘Mummy wrote to Mr Garbel and said how interesting she found his letter.’

‘Did you, Mummy?’

‘One has to be polite,’ Troy muttered and laid a thin stroke of rose on the mouth of Ricky’s portrait.

‘And he wrote back sending her three used bus tickets and a used train ticket.’

‘Does she collect them?’

‘Mr Garbel thought she would like to know that they were his tickets punched by guards and conductors all for him. He also sends her beautifully coloured postcards of the Maritime Alps.’

‘What’s that? May I have them?’

‘… with arrows pointing to where his house would be if you could see it and to where the road goes to a house he sometimes visits, only the house is off the postcard.’

‘Like a picture puzzle, sort of?’

‘Sort of. And he tells Mummy how, when he was young and doing chemistry at Cambridge, he almost met her great-aunt who was his second cousin, once removed.’

‘Did he have a shop?’

‘No, he’s a special kind of chemist without a shop. When he sends Mummy presents of used tickets and old newspapers he writes on them: ‘Sent by P.E. Garbel, 16 Rue des Violettes, Roqueville, to Mrs Agatha Alleyn (née Troy) daughter of Stephen and Harriet Troy (née Baynton.)”

‘That’s you, isn’t it, Mummy? What else?’

‘Is it possible, Ricky,’ asked his wondering father, ‘that you find this interesting?’

‘Yes,’ said Ricky. ‘I like it. Does he mention me?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Or you?’

‘He suggests that Mummy might care to read parts of his letter to me.’

‘May we go and see him?’

‘Yes,’ said Alleyn. ‘As a matter of fact I think we may.’

Troy turned from her work and gaped at her husband. ‘What can you mean?’ she exclaimed.

‘Is it time, Mummy? Because it must be, so may I get down?’

‘Yes, thank you, my sweet. You have been terribly good and I must think of some exciting reward.’

‘Going to see Mr Garbel, frinstance?’

‘I’m afraid,’ Troy said, ‘that Daddy, poor thing, was being rather silly.’

‘Well then – ride to Babylon?’ Ricky suggested and looked out of the corners of his eyes at his father.

‘All right,’ Alleyn groaned, parodying despair, ‘OK. All right. Here we go!’

He swung the excitedly squealing Ricky up to his shoulders and grasped his ankles.

‘Good old horse,’ Ricky shouted and patted his father’s cheek. ‘Non-stop to Babylon. Good old horse.’

Troy looked dotingly at him. ‘Say to Nanny that I said you could ask for an extra high tea.’

‘Top highest with strawberry jam?’

‘If there is any.’

‘Lavish!’ said Ricky and gave a cry of primitive food-lust. ‘Giddy-up horse,’ he shouted. The family of Alleyn broke into a chant:

How many miles to Babylon?

Five score and ten.

Can I get there by candle-light?

‘Yes! and back again!’ Ricky yelled and was carried at a canter from the room.

Troy listened to the diminishing rumpus on the stairs and looked at her work.

‘How happy we are!’ she thought and then, foolishly, ‘touch wood!’ And she picked up a brush and dragged a touch of colour from the hair across the brow. ‘How lucky I am,’ she thought, more soberly and her mood persisted when Alleyn came back with his hair tousled like Ricky’s and his tie under his ear.

He said: ‘May I look?’

‘All right,’ Troy agreed, wiping her brushes, ‘but don’t say anything.’

He grinned and walked round to the front of the easel. Troy had painted a head that seemed to have light as its substance. Even the locks of dark hair might have been spun from sunshine. It was a work in line rather than in mass but the line flowed and turned with a subtlety that made any further elaboration unnecessary. ‘It needs another hour,’ Troy muttered.

‘In that case,’ Alleyn said, ‘I can at least touch wood.’

She gave him a quick grateful look and said, ‘What is all this about Mr Garbel?’

‘I saw the A.C. this morning. He was particularly nice, which generally means he’s got you pricked down for a particularly nasty job. On the face of it this one doesn’t sound so bad. It seems MI5 and the Sureté are having a bit of a party with the Narcotics Bureau, and our people want somebody with fairly fluent French to go over for talks and a bit of field-work. As it is MI5 we’d better observe the usual rule of airy tact on your part and phony inscrutability on mine. But it turns out that the field-work lies, to coin a coy phrase, not a hundred miles from Roqueville.’

‘Never!’ Troy ejaculated. ‘In the Garbel country?’

‘Precisely. Now it occurs to me that what with war, Ricky and the atrocious nature of my job, we’ve never had a holiday abroad together. Nanny is due for a fortnight at Reading. Why shouldn’t you and Ricky come with me to Roqueville and call on Mr Garbel?’

Troy looked delighted but she said: ‘You can’t go round doing top-secret jobs for MI5 trailing your wife and child. It would look so amateurish. Besides, we agreed never to mix business with pleasure, Rory.’

‘In this case the more amateurish I look, the better. And I should only be based on Roqueville. The job lies outside it, so we wouldn’t really be mixing business with pleasure.’

He looked at her for a moment. ‘Do come,’ he said, ‘you know you’re dying to meet Mr Garbel.’

Troy scraped her palette. ‘I’m dying to come,’ she amended, ‘but not to meet Mr Garbel. And yet: I don’t know. There’s a sort of itch, I confess it, to find out just how deadly dull he is. Like a suicidal tendency.’

‘You must yield to it. Write to him and tell him you’re coming. You might enclose a bus ticket from Putney to the Fulham Road. How do you address him: ‘Dear Cousin –’ but what is his Christian name?’

‘I’ve no idea. He’s just P.E. Garbel. To his intimates, he tells me, he is known as Peg. He adds inevitably, a quip about being square in a round hole.’

‘Roqueville being the hole?’

‘Presumably.’

‘Has he a job, do you think?’

‘For all I know he may be writing a monograph on bicarbonate of soda. If he is he’ll probably ask us to read the manuscript.’

‘At all events we must meet him. Put down that damn’ palette and tell me you’re coming.’

Troy wiped her hands on her smock. ‘We’re coming,’ she said.

II

In his château outside Roqueville Mr Oberon looked across the nighted Mediterranean towards North Africa and then smiled gently upon his assembled guests.

‘How fortunate we are,’ he said. ‘Not a jarring note. All gathered together with one pure object in mind.’ He ran over their names as if they composed a sort of celestial roll-call. ‘Our youngest disciple,’ he said beaming on Ginny Taylor. ‘A wonderful field of experience awaits her. She stands on the threshold of ecstasy. It is not too much to say, of ecstasy. And Robin too.’ Robin Herrington, who had been watching Ginny Taylor, looked up sharply. ‘Ah, youth, youth,’ sighed Mr Oberon ambiguously and turned to the remaining guests, two men and a woman. ‘Do we envy them?’ he asked and answered himself. ‘No! No, for ours is the richer tilth. We are the husbandmen, are we not?’

Dr Baradi lifted his dark, fleshy and intelligent head. He looked at his host. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘We are precisely that. And when Annabella arrives – I think you said she was coming?’

‘Dear Annabella!’ Mr Oberon exclaimed. ‘Yes. On Tuesday. Unexpectedly.’

‘Ah!’ said Carbury Glande, looking at his paint-stained finger-nails. ‘On Tuesday. Then she will be rested and ready for our Thursday rites.’

‘Dear Annabella!’ Dr Baradi echoed sumptuously.

The sixth guest turned her ravaged face and short-sighted eyes towards Ginny Taylor.

‘Is this your first visit?’ she asked.

Ginny was looking at Mr Oberon. She wore an expression that was unbecoming to her youth, a look of uncertainty, excitement and perhaps fear.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My first.’

‘A neophyte,’ Baradi murmured richly.

‘Soon to be so young a priestess,’ Mr Oberon added. ‘It is very touching.’ He smiled at Ginny with parted lips.

A tinkling crash broke across the conversation. Robin Herrington had dropped his glass on the tessellated floor. The remains of his cocktail ran into a little pool near Mr Oberon’s feet.

Mr Oberon cut across his apologies. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It is a happy symbol. Perhaps a promise. Let us call it a libation,’ he said. ‘Shall we dine?’

CHAPTER 1

Journey to the South

Alleyn lifted himself on his elbow and turned his watch to the blue light above his pillow. Twenty minutes past five. In another hour they would be in Roqueville.

The abrupt fall of silence when the train stopped must have woken him. He listened intently but, apart from the hiss of escaping steam and the slam of a door in a distant carriage, everything was quiet and still.

He heard the men in the double sleeper next to his own exchange desultory remarks. One of them yawned loudly.

Alleyn thought the station must be Douceville. Sure enough, someone walked past the window and a lonely voice announced to the night: ‘Douce-v-i-ll-e.’

The engine hissed again. The same voice, apparently continuing a broken conversation, called out: ‘Pas ce soir, par exemple!’ Someone else laughed distantly. The voices receded to be followed by the most characteristic of all stationary-train noises, the tap of steel on steel. The taps tinkered away into the distance.

Alleyn manoeuvred himself to the bottom of his bunk, dangled his long legs in space for a moment and then slithered to the floor. The window was not completely shuttered. He peered through the gap and was confronted by the bottom of a poster for Dubonnet and the lower half of a porter carrying a lamp. The lamp swung to and fro, a bell rang and the train clanked discreetly. The lamp and poster were replaced by the lower halves of two discharged passengers, a pile of luggage, a stretch of empty platform and a succession of swiftly moving pools of light. Then there was only the night hurrying past with blurred suggestions of rocks and olive trees.

The train gathered speed and settled down to its perpetual choriambic statement: ‘What a to-do. What a to-do.’

Alleyn cautiously lowered the window-blind. The train was crossing the seaward end of a valley and the moon in its third quarter was riding the westward heavens. Its radiance emphasized the natural pallor of hills and trees and dramatized the shapes of rocks and mountains. With the immediate gesture of a shutter, a high bank obliterated this landscape. The train passed through a village and for two seconds Alleyn looked into a lamplit room where a woman watched a man intent over an early breakfast. What occupation got them up so soon? They were there, sharp in his vision, and were gone.

He turned from the window wondering if Troy, who shared his pleasure in train journeys, was awake in her single berth next door. In twenty minutes he would go and see. In the meantime he hoped that, in the almost complete darkness, he could dress himself without making a disturbance. He began to do so, steadying himself against the lurch and swing of this small, noisy and unstable world.

‘Hallo.’ A treble voice ventured from the blackness of the lower bunk. ‘Are we getting out soon?’

‘Hallo,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘No, go to sleep.’

‘I couldn’t be wakier. Matter of fac’ I’ve been awake pretty well all night.’

Alleyn groped for his shirt, staggered, barked his shin on the edge of his suitcase and swore under his breath.

‘Because,’ the treble voice continued, ‘if we aren’t getting out why are you dressing yourself?’

‘To be ready for when we are.’

‘I see,’ said the voice. ‘Is Mummy getting ready for getting out too?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s not time.’

‘Is she asleep?’

‘I don’t know, old boy.’

‘Then how do you know she’s not getting ready?’

‘I don’t know, really. I just hope she’s not.’

‘Why?’

‘I want her to rest, and if you say why again I won’t answer.’

‘I see.’ There was a pause. The voice chuckled. ‘Why?’ it asked.

Alleyn had found his shirt. He now discovered that he had put it on inside out. He took it off.

‘If,’ the voice pursued, ‘I said a sensible why, would you answer, Daddy?’

‘It would have to be entirely sensible.’

‘Why are you getting up in the dark?’

‘I had hoped,’ Alleyn said bitterly, ‘that all little boys were fast asleep and I didn’t want to wake them.’

‘Because now you know, they aren’t asleep so why – ?’

‘You’re perfectly right,’ Alleyn said. The train rounded a curve and he ran with some violence against the door. He switched on the light and contemplated his son.

Ricky had the newly-made look peculiar to little boys in bed. His dark hair hung sweetly over his forehead, his eyes shone and his cheeks and lips were brilliant. One would have said he was so new that his colours had not yet dried.

‘I like being in a train,’ he said, ‘more lavishly than anything that’s ever happened so far. Do you like being in a train, Daddy?’

‘Yes,’ said Alleyn. He opened the door of the washing-cabinet which lit itself up. Ricky watched his father shave.

‘Where are we now?’ he said presently.

‘By a sea. It’s called the Mediterranean and it’s just out there on the other side of the train. We shall see it when it’s daytime.’

‘Are we in the middle of the night?’

‘Not quite. We’re in the very early morning. Out there everybody is fast asleep,’ Alleyn suggested, not very hopefully.

‘Everybody?’

‘Almost everybody. Fast asleep and snoring.’

‘All except us,’ Ricky said with rich satisfaction, ‘because we are lavishly wide awake in the very early morning in a train. Aren’t we Daddy?’

‘That’s it. Soon we’ll pass the house where I’m going tomorrow. The train doesn’t stop there, so I have to go on with you to Roqueville and drive back. You and Mummy will stay in Roqueville.’

‘Where will you be most of the time?’

‘Sometimes with you and sometimes at this house. It’s called the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent. That means the House of the Silver Goat.’

‘Pretty funny name, however,’ said Ricky.

A stream of sparks ran past the window. The light from the carriage flew across the surface of a stone wall. The train had begun to climb steeply. It gradually slowed down until there was time to see nearby objects lamplit, in the world outside: a giant cactus, a flight of steps, part of an olive grove. The engine laboured almost to a standstill. Outside their window, perhaps a hundred yards away, there was a vast house that seemed to grow out of the cliff. It stood full in the moonlight and shadows, black as ink, were thrown by buttresses across its recessed face. A solitary window, veiled by a patterned blind, glowed dully yellow.

‘Somebody is awake out there,’ Ricky observed. ‘ “Out” “In”?’ he speculated. ‘Daddy, what are those people? “Out” or “In”?’

‘Outside for us, I suppose, and inside for them.’

‘Ouside the train and inside the house,’ Ricky agreed. ‘Suppose the train ran through the house, would they be “in” for us?’

‘I hope,’ his father observed glumly, ‘that you won’t grow up a metaphysician.’

‘What’s that? Look, there they are in their house. We’ve stopped, haven’t we?’

The carriage window was exactly opposite the lighted one in the cliff-like wall of the house. A blurred shape moved in the room on the other side of the blind. It swelled and became a black body pressed against the window.

Allyen made a sharp ejaculation and a swift movement.

‘Because you’re standing right in front of the window,’ Ricky said politely, ‘and it would be rather nice to see out.’

The train jerked galvanically and with a compound racketing noise, slowly entered a tunnel, emerged, and gathering pace, began a descent to sea-level.

The door of the compartment opened and Troy stood there in a woollen dressing-gown. Her short hair was rumpled and hung over her forehead like her son’s. Her face was white and her eyes dark with perturbation. Alleyn turned quickly. She looked from him to Ricky. ‘Have you seen out of the window?’ she asked.

‘I have,’ said Alleyn. ‘And so, by the look of you, have you.’

Troy said, ‘Can you help me with my suitcase?’ and to Ricky: ‘I’ll come back and get you up soon, darling.’

‘Are you both going?’

‘We’ll be just next door. We shan’t be long,’ Alleyn said.

‘It’s only because it’s in a train.’

‘We know,’ Troy reassured him. ‘But it’s all right. Honestly. OK?’

‘OK,’ Ricky said in a small voice and Troy touched his cheek.

Alleyn followed her into her own compartment. She sat down on her bunk and stared at him. ‘I can’t believe that was true,’ she said.