An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

  She had a visitor. There was a woman waiting, shoulders against the door—a woman who looked cool and incongruous against the dirty paintwork and the greasy walls. Cordelia caught her breath in surprise, her upward rush checked. Her light shoes had made no sound on the stairway and for a few seconds she saw her visitor unobserved. She gained an impression, immediate and vivid, of competence and authority and an intimidating rightness of dress. The woman was wearing a grey suit with a small stand-away collar which showed a narrow band of white cotton at the throat. Her black patent shoes were obviously expensive, a large black bag with patch pockets was slung from her left shoulder. She was tall and her hair, prematurely white, was cut short and moulded to her head like a cap. Her face was pale and long. She was reading the Times, the paper folded so that she could hold it in her right hand. After a couple of seconds, she became aware of Cordelia and their eyes met. The woman looked at her wristwatch.

  “If you are Cordelia Gray, then you’re eighteen minutes late. This notice says that you would return at four o’clock.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.” Cordelia hurried up the last few steps and fitted the Yale key into the lock. She opened the door.

  “Won’t you come in?”

  The woman preceded her into the outer office and turned to face her without giving the room even a glance.

  “I was hoping to see Mr. Pryde. Will he be long?”

  “I’m sorry; I’ve just come back from his cremation. I mean … Bernie’s dead.”

  “Obviously. Our information was that he was alive ten days ago. He must have died with remarkable speed and discretion.”

  “Not with discretion. Bernie killed himself.”

  “How extraordinary!” The visitor seemed to be struck by its extraordinariness. She pressed her hands together and for a few seconds walked restlessly about the room in a curious pantomime of distress.

  “How extraordinary!” she said again. She gave a little snort of laughter. Cordelia didn’t speak, but the two women regarded each other gravely. Then the visitor said: “Well, I seem to have had a wasted journey.”

  Cordelia breathed an almost inaudible “Oh no!” and resisted an absurd impulse to fling her body against the door.

  “Please don’t go before talking to me. I was Mr. Pryde’s partner and I own the business now. I’m sure I could help. Won’t you please sit down?”

  The visitor took no notice of the offered chair.

  “No one can help, no one in the world. However that is beside the point. There is something which my employer particularly wants to know—some information he requires—and he had decided that Mr. Pryde was the person to get it for him. I don’t know if he would consider you an effective substitute. Is there a private telephone here?”

  “In here, please.”

  The woman walked into the inner office, again with no sign that its shabbiness had made any impression on her. She turned to Cordelia.

  “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. My name is Elizabeth Leaming and my employer is Sir Ronald Callender.”

  “The conservationist?”

  “I shouldn’t let him hear you call him that. He prefers to be called a microbiologist, which is what he is. Please excuse me.”

  She shut the door firmly. Cordelia, feeling suddenly weak, sat down at the typewriter. The keys, oddly familiar symbols encircled in black medallions, shifted their pattern before her tired eyes, then at a blink clicked back to normality. She grasped the sides of the machine, cold and clammy to the touch, and talked herself back to calmness. Her heart was thudding.

  “I must be calm, must show her that I am tough. This silliness is only the strain of Bernie’s funeral and too much standing in the hot sun.”

  But hope was traumatic; she was angry with herself for caring so much.

  The telephone call took only a couple of minutes. The door of the inner office opened; Miss Leaming was drawing on her gloves.

  “Sir Ronald has asked to see you. Can you come now?”

  Come where, thought Cordelia, but she didn’t ask.

  “Yes, shall I need my gear?”

  The gear was Bernie’s carefully designed and fitted-out scene-of-crime case with its tweezers, scissors, fingerprinting equipment, jars to collect specimens; Cordelia had never yet had occasion to use it.

  “It depends upon what you mean by your gear, but I shouldn’t think so. Sir Ronald wants to see you before deciding whether to offer you the job. It means a train journey to Cambridge but you should get back tonight. Is there anyone you ought to tell?”

  “No, there’s only me.”

  “Perhaps I ought to identify myself.” She opened her handbag. “Here is an addressed envelope. I’m not a white slaver in case they exist and in case you’re frightened.”

  “I’m frightened of quite a number of things but not of white slavers and if I were, an addressed envelope would hardly reassure me. I’d insist on telephoning Sir Ronald Callender to check.”

  “Perhaps you would like to do so?” suggested Miss Leaming without rancour.

  “No.”

  “Then shall we go?” Miss Leaming led the way to the door. As they went out to the landing and Cordelia turned to lock the office behind her, her visitor indicated the notepad and pencil hanging together from a nail on the wall.

  “Hadn’t you better change the notice?”

  Cordelia tore off her previous message and after a moment’s thought wrote: I am called away to an urgent case. Any messages pushed through the door will receive my immediate and personal attention on return.

  “That,” pronounced Miss Leaming, “should reassure your clients.”

  Cordelia wondered if the remark was sarcastic; it was impossible to tell from the detached tone. But she didn’t feel that Miss Leaming was laughing at her and was surprised at her own lack of resentment at the way in which her visitor had taken charge of events. Meekly, she followed Miss Leaming down the stairs and into Kingly Street.

  They travelled by the Central Line to Liverpool Street and caught the 17.36 train to Cambridge with plenty of time. Miss Leaming bought Cordelia’s ticket, collected a portable typewriter and a briefcase of papers from the left-luggage department and led the way to a first-class carriage. She said: “I shall have to work on the train; have you anything to read?”

  “That’s all right. I don’t like talking when I’m travelling either. I’ve got Hardy’s Trumpet-Major—I always have a paperback in my bag.”

  After Bishop’s Stortford they had the compartment to themselves but only once did Miss Leaming look up from her work to question Cordelia.

  “How did you come to be working for Mr. Pryde?”

  “After I left school I went to live with my father on the continent. We travelled around a good deal. He died in Rome last May after a heart attack and I came home. I had taught myself some shorthand and typing so I took a job with a secretarial agency. They sent me to Bernie and after a few weeks he let me help him with one or two of the cases. He decided to train me and I agreed to stay on permanently. Two months ago he made me his partner.”

  All that had meant was that Cordelia gave up a regular wage in return for the uncertain rewards of success in the form of an equal share of the profits together with a rent-free bed-sitting room in Bernie’s house. He hadn’t meant to cheat. The offer of the partnership had been made in the genuine belief that she would recognize it for what it was; not a good-conduct prize but an accolade of trust.

  “What was your father?”

  “He was an itinerant Marxist poet and an amateur revolutionary.”

  “You must have had an interesting childhood.”

  Remembering the succession of foster mothers, the unexplained incomprehensible moves from house to house, the changes of schools, the concerned faces of Local Authority Welfare Officers and school teachers desperately wondering what to do with her in the holidays, Cordelia replied as she always did to this assertion, gravely and without irony.

  “Yes, it was
very interesting.”

  “And what was this training you received from Mr. Pryde?”

  “Bernie taught me some of the things he learnt in the CID: how to search the scene of a crime properly, how to collect exhibits, some elementary self-defence, how to detect and lift fingerprints—that kind of thing.”

  “Those are skills which I hardly feel you will find appropriate to this case.”

  Miss Leaming bent her head over her papers and did not speak again until the train reached Cambridge.

  Outside the station Miss Leaming briefly surveyed the car park and led the way towards a small black van. Standing beside it as rigidly as a uniformed chauffeur, was a stockily built young man dressed in an open-necked white shirt, dark breeches and tall boots, who Miss Leaming introduced casually and without explanation as “Lunn.” He nodded briefly in acknowledgement of the introduction but did not smile. Cordelia held out her hand. His grip was momentary but remarkably strong, crushing her fingers; suppressing a grimace of pain she saw a flicker in the large mud-brown eyes and wondered if he had hurt her deliberately. The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves’ eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world’s terrors. But their beauty emphasized rather than redeemed the unattractiveness of the rest of him. He was, she thought, a sinister study in black and white with his thick, short neck and powerful shoulders straining the seams of his shirt. He had a helmet of strong black hair, a pudgy slightly pock-marked face and a moist petulant mouth; the face of a ribald cherub. He was a man who sweated profusely; the underarms of his shirt were stained and the cotton stuck to the flesh emphasizing the strong curve of the back and the obtrusive biceps.

  Cordelia saw that the three of them were to sit squashed together in the front of the van. Lunn held open the door without apology except to state: “The Rover’s still in dock.”

  Miss Leaming hung back so that Cordelia was compelled to get in first and sit beside him. She thought: “They don’t like each other and he resents me.”

  She wondered about his position in Sir Ronald Callender’s household. Miss Leaming’s place she had already guessed; no ordinary secretary, however long in service, however indispensable, had quite that air of authority or talked of “my employer” in that tone of possessive irony. But she wondered about Lunn. He didn’t behave like a subordinate but nor did he strike her as a scientist. True, scientists were alien creatures to her. Sister Mary Magdalen was the only one she had known. Sister had taught what the syllabus dignified as general science, a hotchpotch of elementary physics, chemistry and biology unceremoniously lumped together. Science subjects were in general little regarded at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, although the arts were well taught. Sister Mary Magdalen had been an elderly and timid nun, eyes puzzled behind steel-rimmed spectacles, her clumsy fingers permanently stained with chemicals, who had apparently been as surprised as her pupils at the extraordinary explosions and fumes which her activities with test tube and flask had occasionally produced. She had been more concerned to demonstrate the incomprehensibility of the universe and the inscrutability of God’s laws than to reveal scientific principles and in this she had certainly succeeded. Cordelia felt that Sister Mary Magdalen would be no help to her in dealing with Sir Ronald Callender; Sir Ronald who had campaigned in the cause of conservation long before his interest became a popular obsession, who had represented his country at International Conferences on Ecology and been knighted for his services to conservation. All this Cordelia, like the rest of the country, knew from his television appearances and the Sunday colour supplements. He was the establishment scientist, carefully uncommitted politically, who personified to everyone’s reassurance the poor boy who had made good and stayed good. How, Cordelia wondered, had he come to think of employing Bernie Pryde?

  Uncertain how far Lunn was in his employer’s or Miss Leaming’s confidence, she asked carefully: “How did Sir Ronald hear about Bernie?”

  “John Bellinger told him.”

  So the Bellinger bonus had arrived at last! Bernie had always expected it. The Bellinger case had been his most lucrative, perhaps his only, success. John Bellinger was the director of a small family firm which manufactured specialized scientific instruments. The previous year his office had been plagued by an outbreak of obscene letters and, unwilling to call in the police, he had telephoned Bernie. Bernie, taken on the staff at his own suggestion as a messenger, had quickly solved a not-very-difficult problem. The writer had been Bellinger’s middle-aged and highly regarded personal secretary. Bellinger had been grateful. Bernie, after anxious thought and consultation with Cordelia, had sent in a bill the size of which had astounded them both and the bill had been promptly paid. It had kept the Agency going for a month. Bernie had said: “We’ll get a bonus from the Bellinger case, see if we don’t. Anything can happen in this job. He only chose us by picking our name from the telephone directory but now he’ll recommend us to his friends. This case could be the beginning of something big.”

  And now, thought Cordelia, on the day of Bernie’s funeral, the Bellinger bonus had arrived.

  She asked no more questions and the drive, which took less than thirty minutes, passed in silence. The three of them sat thigh to thigh, but distanced. She saw nothing of the city. At the end of Station Road by the War Memorial the car turned to the left and soon they were in the country. There were wide fields of young corn, the occasional stretch of tree-lined dappled shade, straggling villages of thatched cottages and squat red villas strung along the road, low uplands from which Cordelia could see the towers and spires of the city, shining with deceptive nearness in the evening sun. Finally, there was another village, a thin belt of elms fringing the road, a long curving wall of red brick, and the van turned in through open wrought-iron gates. They had arrived.

  The house was obviously Georgian, not perhaps the best Georgian, but solidly built, agreeably proportioned and with the look of all good domestic architecture of having grown naturally out of its site. The mellow brick, festooned with wisteria, gleamed richly in the evening sun so that the green of the creeper glowed and the whole house looked suddenly as artificial and unsubstantial as a film set. It was essentially a family house, a welcoming house. But now a heavy silence lay over it and the rows of elegantly proportioned windows were empty eyes.

  Lunn, who had driven fast but skilfully, braked in front of the porch. He stayed in his seat while the two women got out, then drove the van round the side of the house. As she slid down from the high seat Cordelia could glimpse a range of low buildings, topped with small ornamental turrets, which she took to be stables or garages. Through the wide-arched gateway she could see that the grounds dropped slowly away to give a far vista of the flat Cambridgeshire countryside, patterned with the gentle greens and fawns of early summer.

  Miss Leaming said: “The stable block has been converted into laboratories. Most of the east side is now glass. It was a skilful job by a Swedish architect, functional but attractive.”

  For the first time since they had met her voice sounded interested, almost enthusiastic.

  The front door was open. Cordelia came into a wide, panelled hall with a staircase curving to the left, a carved stone fireplace to the right. She was aware of a smell of roses and lavender, of carpets gleaming richly against polished wood, of the subdued ticking of a clock.

  Miss Leaming led the way to a door immediately across the hall. It led to a study, a room book-lined and elegant, one with a view of wide lawns and a shield of trees. In front of the French windows was a Georgian desk and behind the desk sat a man.

  Cordelia had seen his photographs in the Press and knew what to expect. But he was at once smaller and more impressive than she had imagined. She knew that she was facing a man of authority and high intelligence; his strength came over like a physical force. But as he rose from his seat and waved her to a chair, she saw that he was slighter than his photographs suggested, the heavy shoul
ders and impressive head making the body look top-heavy. He had a lined, sensitive face with a high-bridged nose, deep-set eyes on which the lids weighed heavily and a mobile, sculptured mouth. His black hair, as yet unflecked with grey, lay heavily across his brow. His face was shadowed with weariness and, as Cordelia came closer, she could detect the twitch of a nerve in his left temple and the almost imperceptible staining of the veins in the irises of the deep-set eyes. But his compact body, taut with energy and latent vigour, made no concession to tiredness. The arrogant head was held high, the eyes were keen and wary under the heavy lids. Above all he looked successful. Cordelia had seen that look before, had recognized it from the back of crowds as, inscrutable, they had watched the famous and notorious pass on their way—that almost physical glow, akin to sexuality and undimmed by weariness or ill-health, of men who knew and enjoyed the realities of power.

  Miss Leaming said: “This is all that remains of Pryde’s Detective Agency—Miss Cordelia Gray.”

  The keen eyes looked into Cordelia’s.

  “We take a Pride in our Work. Do you?”

  Cordelia, tired after her journey at the end of a momentous day, was in no mood for jokes about poor Bernie’s pathetic pun. She said: “Sir Ronald, I have come here because your secretary said that you might want to employ me. If she’s wrong, I would be glad to know so that I can get back to London.”

  “She isn’t my secretary and she isn’t wrong. You must forgive my discourtesy; it’s a little disconcerting to expect a burly ex-policeman and to get you. I’m not complaining, Miss Gray; you might do very well. What are your fees?”

  The question might have sounded offensive but it wasn’t; he was completely matter-of-fact. Cordelia told him, a little too quickly, a little too eagerly.

  “Five pounds a day and expenses, but we try to keep those as low as possible. For that, of course, you get my sole services. I mean I don’t work for any other client until your case is finished.”