She did not, however, look forward to telling Soapy of this third expeditionary disaster. He would sympathise, he would be all that a loving and understanding husband should be, but he would not be able to conceal that this was a blow. 'Where do we go from here?' he would ask, and her only answer would be that she was goshdarned if she knew. It seemed to her, as it would seem to him, that every stone had been turned and every avenue explored. She could not keep on getting bright ideas indefinitely, and Soapy, except when he was selling oil stock, never had any.
It was as she mused thus, sipping coffee and thinking hard thoughts of Myrtle Prosser, whom it would have been a genuine pleasure to her to dip feet first in a vat of molten lead, that Freddie, alighting from the 6.03 down train, arriving Valley Fields 6.24, started to walk to Peacehaven.
The rain had stopped, which was all to the good, for he had gone out that morning without his umbrella, and not even the thought that, George being away for the evening, he would have to cook dinner for himself was able to affect his mood of bien être. Sally loved him, and he would shortly have a cool ten thousand pounds in his hip pocket, and, as for dinner, there were always sardines. As he latch-keyed himself into Peacehaven, one would not be far wrong in saying that there was a song on his lips.
There was also, it was borne in upon him as he entered, a song on somebody else's lips, the somebody in question apparently being in the kitchen, for as he parked hat on hat-stand he could hear a distinct rendition of a popular ballad proceeding from that direction. This struck him as odd, for he had supposed that his cousin George, wafted London-wards on the wings of love, would have left long 'ere this. Another aspect of the matter that puzzled him was why George's voice, normally a pleasant baritone, should suddenly have become a highish soprano.
The singing ceased. Dolly had been doing it merely to cheer herself up, and this object she had now succeeded in accomplishing. She finished washing her coffee cup and the knife with which she had cut herself a slice of seed cake, and came into the living-room, giving Freddie much the same feeling of having had a bomb touched off under him as the ghost of Banquo on a memorable occasion gave Macbeth. In the days before his roving affections had centred on Sally he had had a good deal of experience of girls popping up at unexpected moments in unexpected places, but he had never seen one before wearing his spare pyjamas. A perfect stranger, too, it seemed to him, which deepened the bizarre note.
Then Dolly, who felt that it was for her to open the conversation, said, 'Hi, brother Widgeon! How's tricks?' and he recognized her as the wife of Mr. Molloy, his benefactor. He was conscious of a passing wish that this woman would not keep flitting into his life every hour on the hour like a family spectre, but she was linked by marriage to the man who had set his feet on the ladder of affluence by letting him have that Silver River stock, so she must not be allowed to think that her presence was unwelcome. Replacing his heart, which had bumped against his front teeth, he said:
'Oh, hullo, there you are.'
'Nice meeting you again.'
'Nice of you to drop in. Beastly weather, what?'
'You said it.'
'Seems to be clearing up a bit, though, now.'
'That's good.'
'Rain's stopped.'
'Probably just biding its time.'
'I shouldn't wonder. Care for a cup of tea?' '
I've had some coffee.'
'Have some more.'
'No, thanks. Well, I guess I ought to explain why I've butted in in this way.'
'Not at all. Any time you're passing.'
'That's just what I was doing - passing. And that storm suddenly came on, and I was getting soaked, so I dashed in here.'
'I get the idea. For shelter, as it were?'
'That's right. Nobody can say I haven't sense enough to come in out of the rain, ha, ha.'
'Ha, ha,' echoed Freddie, but not blithely. Once again he was thinking of what Sally would make of all this, were it to be drawn to her attention.
'I borrowed your pyjamas on account of if I stuck around in a wet dress, I might get a cold.'
'Or pneumonia. Quite right.'
'You aren't sore?'
'No, no.'
'I wish I could say the same of myself. Coming here in such a rush, I fell and scraped my knee, and it's kind of acting up.'
'Good heavens!'
'Rubbed quite a bit of skin off it. Take a look.'
'At your knee?'
'That's the knee I mean.'
A wrinkle creased the smoothness of Freddie's brow. His devotion to Sally being one hundred per cent, if not more, it was wholly foreign to his policy to take a look at the knees of others of her sex, especially of those so spectacularly comely as Mrs. Thomas G. Molloy. A year ago he would have sprung to the task, full of the party spirit, but now he was a changed, deeper man who had put all that sort of thing behind him. However, he was also a host, and a host cannot indulge his personal feelings.
'Right ho,' he said. 'Let's have a dekko. Egad,' he went on, having had it, 'that doesn't look too good. You ought to see the tribal medicine man about it. Nasty flesh wound, might cause lockjaw. And you don't want that.'
Dolly admitted that she had no great fondness for lockjaw.
'The only catch is that you can't very well go charging about Valley Fields, looking for doctors, in striped pyjamas. I'll tell you what,' said Freddie. 'My cousin George has some iodine. I'll go and fetch it.'
'Too bad, giving you all this trouble.'
'No trouble, no trouble at all. And George won't mind. You haven't met him, have you?'
'Why, yes, I did run into him for a moment.'
'Nice chap.'
'Yay. Not like most cops I know.'
'Do you know a lot of cops?'
'Well, not socially, but I've seen them around. Over in the States they're kind of tough.'
'I know what you mean. Not bonhomous.'
'They don't know how to treat a lady, the flat-footed sons of bachelors.'
'I'll bet they don't. Well, ho for the iodine. George keeps it in his room.'
The window of George's room looked on the back garden, and if Freddie had happened to glance out of it, he would have observed a slim figure making its way to the back door of Castlewood. Sally, for, as Leila Yorke was fond of saying in her novels, it was she, had no latchkey and did not want to disturb her employer by ringing the front door bell.
She entered the rear premises and reaching the living-room found Leila Yorke reading a magazine.
'Sorry I couldn't get back earlier,' she said. 'Busy day. How did the interview go off?'
'Better than I had expected,' said Leila Yorke. 'Most interviewers in my experience are recruited from homes for the mentally afflicted, but this one was a nice bright girl. We got along like anything. But a curious thing happened. She suddenly disappeared.'
'Faded away, you mean, like the Cheshire Cat?'
'As far as I can make out, she must have gone into the garden and left that way.'
'In all that rain? Odd.'
'That's what I thought, but I wasn't giving it much attention, as I was coping at the time with Mrs. Prosser.'
'Oh, did she come? Freddie's friend Oofy's wife? To reason with you about the book, I suppose?'
'Yes, she talked for hours and would be talking still, if I hadn't edged her to the door and pushed her out. But I don't want to sit chewing the fat about Ma Prosser. Tell me what happened when you saw Johnnie Shoesmith.'
'Well, I went in.'
'Yes?'
'And he gave me a nasty look.'
'Was that all?'
'No, he gave me several more in the course of our chat. Would you call him a very genial sort of man?'
'Johnnie can be the world's leading louse when he likes, and he seems to like all the time these days. Comes of being a solicitor. They get soured. Did he recommend a private eye?'
'Yes, I suppose you could call it that. He grabbed the telephone directory, looked at the classified section an
d picked the name of the top of the list, a man called Adair. J. Sheringham Adair.'
'Nonsense. There isn't such a name.'
'Well, that's what he says it is. I went to see him, and there it was in large letters on his door. He's got a dingy little office in a dingy little backwater called Halsey Court. It's in Mayfair, so I suppose he thinks of himself as a Mayfair consultant.'
'What's he like?'
'A frightful little man with a face like a monkey and a waxed moustache.'
'Is he any good, do you think?'
'He said he was. He spoke most highly of himself.'
'I imagine all these private eyes are much alike. Oh, well, let's hope for the best.'
'That's the way to talk. He's coming here to see you and get a photograph of your husband. Can you spare him one?'
'Dozens.'
'Then, as you say, we'll hope for the best. And now, will you be wanting me for half an hour or so?'
'No. Why? Want to go to Peacehaven and see your Freddie?'
'That's the idea,' said Sally. 'Give him a nice surprise.'
16
DOLLY’S premonition that her tale of failure would remove the sunshine from Soapy's life and cause him to feel that it was hopeless to struggle further was amply fulfilled. Melancholy marked him for its own not only over the pre-dinner cocktails but at the meal that followed them and next day's breakfast. A student of the Classics, watching him eat eggs and bacon, would have been reminded of Socrates drinking the hemlock, and though it meant a lonely morning for her, she experienced a sense of relief when he exchanged his bedroom slippers for a pair of serviceable shoes and announced that he was going to take a walk and think things over. She found the spectacle of his drawn face painful.
It was a considerable time before he returned, and when he did she was amazed to observe that his face, so far from being drawn, was split toward the middle by a smile so dazzling that she blinked at the sight of it. His opening remark, that everything was now as smooth as silk and that they were sitting pretty deepened her bewilderment. She loved him dearly and yielded to no one in her respect for his ability to sell worthless oil stock to the least promising of prospects, but, except for this one great gift of his, she had no illusions about his intelligence. She knew that she had taken for better or worse one who was practically solid concrete from the neck up, and she liked it. It was her view that brains only unsettle a husband, and she was comfortably conscious of herself possessing enough for the two of them.
'Sitting pretty?' she gasped. It seemed incredible to her that the briskest of walks could have given her loved one anything even remotely resembling an idea. 'How do you figure that out?'
Soapy sank into a chair and took off his left shoe. 'Got a blister,' he announced.
It was no time for wifely sympathy. When pain and anguish wring the left foot, a woman ought, of course, to be a ministering angel, but Dolly's impatience temporarily unfitted her for the role.
'How do you mean, we're sitting pretty?'
'Rustle up the lifesavers, and I'll tell you. The thing's in the bag.'
Dolly rustled up the lifesavers, and he became even brighter at the sight of them.
'Gee!' he said, regarding her fondly between sips. 'You look like a new red wagon, baby.'
'Never mind how I look,' said Dolly, though pleased by the compliment. 'What's happened?'
'You mean the blister? It came on when I'd been walking about half an hour,' said Soapy, massaging his foot, 'and I felt as if I'd a red-hot coal in my shoe. You ever had a blister?'
A dangerous look crept into Dolly's face.
'Get on,' she said. 'Tell me in a few simple words what's given you this idea that we're sitting pretty?'
She spoke quietly, but Soapy had been married long enough to know that a wife's quiet tones are best respected. He embarked on his narrative without further preamble.
'Well, sir, just after I'd got this blister, who do you think I met? Chimp.’
Dolly sniffed, As has been stated Chimp Twist was no favourite of hers. Circumstances in the past had sometimes led to their being associated in business deals, but he ranked in her affections even lower than Mrs. Alexander Prosser.
'Must just have made your day, seeing that little weasel,' she said acidly, and Soapy's smile became broader.
'It did,' he said, 'because what do you think he told me?'
'If it was the time, I'll bet he lied about it.'
'He told me Leila Yorke has engaged him to find her husband.'
'Has she one?'
'Seems so by all accounts, and she's hired Chimp to locate him.'
'He's disappeared?’
'That's what he's done, and Chimp's got the job of looking for him.'
'So what?'
Soapy's eyes widened in surprise. He had supposed her to be quicker at the uptake than this.
'So what?’ he said. 'Use your bean, honey. Why, can't you see, there he'll be, in and out of the house, having conferences and what not all the time, and don't tell me he won't find a chance sooner or later of getting up to that room and putting his hooks on the ice.’
'But he doesn't know it's there.’
'Sure he knows. I told him.’
'What!!'
A strong shudder had shaken Dolly from the top of her perm to the alligator shoes for which a leading department store had been looking everywhere since she had last paid them a visit. Her eyes bulged and her lips parted as if she were about to reveal to her mate just what she thought of this last stupendous act of folly. She did not do this because she loved him, but the gasping cry she uttered was enough to make it clear to him that all was not well.
'You told him?'
Soapy was perplexed. His story was not going as well as he had expected.
'Well, I had to, honey, or he wouldn't have known where to look.’
Again, Dolly's lips parted, and again she closed them. It is possible that she was counting ten, that infallible specific against reckless speech.
'He's going to see her this afternoon, he says. Why, for all we know, he might come back with that ice this evening.
Beats me why you don't seem pleased, baby. Here we were, all washed up with no chance of getting the stuff, and along comes this wonderful bit of luck that solves everything. It isn't as if Chimp wants the earth. He said he would do it for ten per cent of the gross.'
'And you believed him?'
'Sure I believed him. Why wouldn't I?'
'Because you know as well as I do that Chimp Twist is as crooked as a pretzel. What he hasn't learned about double-crossing you could write on a postage stamp. Shall I tell you what's going to happen, in case you're interested? Reach me down my crystal ball for a moment, and I'll peer into the future and give you the dope. Ha! The mists clear, and I see a little rat with a waxed moustache and a face that only a mother could love hurrying down to Valley Fields. He goes into Castlewood. He's sneaking up the stairs to the bedroom. He's looking on top of the wardrobe. What's that he's putting in his pocket? A bag of peanuts? No, by golly, it's the ice I got from Mrs. Prosser. You remember that ice? I was telling you about it the other day. And now what do I behold? Can he be heading for the nearest airport? Yay, that's what he's doing. Now they're telling him to fasten his safety belt. Now the winged monster soars above the clouds, and unless it falls and he breaks his damn neck his next address'll be Box 243, rural free delivery, somewhere in South America. And who are these two poor slobs I can see, sitting watching and waiting and saying, "Ain't he ever coming?"? Their faces seem familiar somehow. Why, it's you and me! Yessir, that's who it is, it's us!'
Dolly paused, panting a little, and Soapy's lower jaw fell slowly like a tired flower drooping on its stem. He was not as a rule an easy man to explain things to, but on this occasion his wife's reasoning had been too lucid to allow of any misunderstanding. He had got the message.
'I never thought of that,' he said.
'Give a mite of attention to it now.'
'Gee!'
/>
'Gee is right.'
'What are we going to do if he hijacks the stuff?’
'Sue him,' said Dolly, and even Soapy could discern that she spoke satirically. He fell into what would have been a thoughtful silence, if he had been capable of thinking. The best he was able to suggest at the end of several minutes was that he should telephone Leila Yorke and warn her to have nothing to do with J. Sheringham Adair, whose private eye activities were a mere cloak or front for criminality of the lowest order.
'So then, if he comes trying to ooze into the house, she'll get action with that gun of hers.' Dolly was not impressed.
'You think she'll have a lot of confidence in what you tell her, after that session you had with her about Silver River Oil and Refinery?'
'I could say I was Inspector somebody speaking from Scotland Yard.'
'With a middle western American accent? Try again.'
Soapy had finished his martini, but though agreeable to the taste and imparting a gentle glow, it brought no inspiration. He chewed his lip, and said it was difficult, and Dolly said Yay, she had noticed that herself.
Soapy scratched his Shakespearian forehead.
‘I don't know what to suggest.'
'Make that double.'
'We might…No, that's no good. Or…No, that's no good, either.'
'Not so hot as your first idea. That first one seemed to me to have possibilities.'
'If only,' said Soapy wistfully, 'there was some way of getting that dame out of the house!'
Dolly, who like a good wife had been refilling his glass, paused with the shaker in mid-air, spellbound. She had not expected to hear so keen a summing-up of the situation from such a source. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, she seemed to be saying to herself.
'Get her out of the house? Soapy, I believe you've got something. When I was down there yesterday, she sort of gave me the impression that it wouldn't take a lot to make her pack up and leave. I got the idea she's kind of pining for that stately home of hers, where there's cooks and butlers and all like that. Nothing she actually said, but that's the way it struck me. Look, finish that up and go take a walk around the block.'