Anne Belinda: A Golden Age Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

“Well?”

  “Anne stayed at an hotel with her old nurse, Mrs. Jones. She and Jenny were to meet and go down to Waveney together. Well, Jenny started, picked Anne up, and took her off for a final fitting of her bridesmaid’s dress, whilst the nurse took the luggage to the station. They were driving along, when Anne suddenly called out. Jenny couldn’t make out what was the matter. Anne said she must stop the taxi and let her get out. She said, ‘Go on down to Waveney. I’ll come by the next train. And if I can’t come, I’ll write.’ She got out of the taxi and legged it. Jenny was most awfully frightened—she didn’t know what had happened, and she didn’t know what to do. In the end she went to the station and met Mrs. Jones, and they went down to Waveney together. Anne didn’t come by the next train, or by any other train. Jenny didn’t dare tell her father. She said Anne was staying with friends. Two days afterwards there was a letter from Anne, addressed to Mrs. Jones at her married daughter’s address in Clapham. Anne said she’d been arrested—for stealing.”

  “Stealing what?”

  John found his mind extraordinarily clear. All the time Nicholas was talking he was picking out one detail here and another there, and filing these details—they must all be gone over very carefully later on. He said, “Stealing what?” and watched Nicholas with a hard, steady gaze.

  “A string of pearls. You may have noticed that Jenny doesn’t wear pearls. That’s why. Anne went into a shop belonging to a little Jew man called Levinski, and she took a string of pearls worth about eight hundred pounds and left a sham lot in their place. This was in the morning, and she got clear away. When she was driving with Jenny, they passed the shop, and Levinski saw her. He’d come out to have a look at his window. He jumped into a taxi just as he was and gave chase. She’d just enough decency not to drag Jenny into the business—or she may have thought she’d more chance of getting away on foot. Anyhow, Levinski came up with her and gave her in charge. The pearls were in her bag. She gave her name as Annie Jones, thank the Lord.”

  “Go on,” said John.

  Nicholas raised his eyebrows.

  “Jenny tried to keep the whole thing from her father. He was pretty shaky—never really held his head up after the sons were killed. Mrs. Jones helped. They told the old man that Anne was ill—in a nursing home in town—not allowed to see anyone. Poor Jen! It must have been the most awful strain. They used to pretend to telephone for news every day. It was pretty ghastly. We were married in the middle of it all. Jenny told me about it when we’d been married a week, and the next thing was a wire from Mrs. Jones, calling us back. Sir Anthony’d found out, and it just smashed him. It nearly smashed Jenny too. It’s a pleasant bit of family history, isn’t it?”

  John’s gaze did not shift.

  “Damnable!” he said. “Go on.”

  “That’s about the end. She pleaded guilty, and she got a year. She’s just out, and she had the audacity to come down here and force herself on Jenny.”

  There was a pause.

  “Who knows?” said John.

  “Jenny and I, the nurse, Carruthers, and yourself.”

  “And Miss Fairlie?”

  “Jenny told her yesterday—she had to, because when people press her too hard, she’s been telling them that Anne was abroad with Aurora.”

  “I see.” John looked away.

  There was a long pause. Then, as Nicholas began to find the silence awkward, John jerked his head up and shot a question at him:

  “Sir Anthony altered his will before he died?”

  “Yes—fortunately; it gives us the whip hand. Apparently Anne expected to be received as if nothing had happened. I’m prepared to let Jenny go halves with her, provided she takes herself out of England and stays there for good.”

  Another silence. This time John didn’t look away; instead, he studied Nicholas Marr’s face critically—a hint of sarcasm in the eyes; a hint of fastidious disgust; something set and implacable about the line of mouth and chin.

  “Have you made this offer?” he asked.

  “Jenny made it yesterday.”

  John put that away with other things.

  And what did she say?”

  Nicholas shrugged his shoulders.

  “She went off to catch her train. She didn’t give any answer, and Jenny was naturally too much upset to press for one.”

  Just for an instant John felt again the cold agony of Anne’s grip, and saw again her blind and anguished eyes. Then he said:

  “You think she didn’t answer. I think you’re wrong.” His tone was rather abstracted.

  “What on earth—”

  “You say Jenny offered her money to stay away. You say she didn’t answer. I think she did. She never went back to the hotel. Do you know where she is now?”

  “Not at the moment. But I don’t flatter myself we’re quit of her.”

  John nodded.

  “You don’t know where she is; and you won’t know where she is—that’s what I think. I think you’ve had your answer—I think you had it when she didn’t go back to the hotel.”

  “Oh, you think that. I wish I did!”

  John’s jaw set rather grim.

  “I want to know how much money she’s got.”

  “I haven’t the least idea.”

  “She hasn’t any of her own?”

  “No.”

  “But she’d have had some on her, I suppose?”

  “I suppose so.” Nicholas did not seem to be greatly interested.

  “The few shillings a girl would have in her purse—perhaps a pound or two. And she’d been to an hotel, and she’d paid her way down here, and had a taxi and kept it waiting. There wouldn’t have been very much left when she’d taken her ticket back to town.” John got up. “Thanks. I’ll be getting along.”

  “Where on earth are you going?” said Nicholas staring.

  John looked back over his shoulder as he moved towards the door.

  “I’m going to find Anne,” he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Anne was in the middle of an interview with Miss Pettigrew. Miss Pettigrew sat at a table on which there was a typewriter, a cyclostyle, a telephone, and a large ledger. She had greyish-brown hair, done in the fashion of the later nineties, and a round and rosy face, out of which there looked two kind but searching eyes. The eyes were of the brightest possible shade of blue.

  “You came out yesterday?” Her voice was exceedingly clear and brisk.

  “Yes.”

  “Now, I wish you’d just looked in. It was a pity you didn’t—yes, really a pity. Why didn’t you?”

  “I was going to friends.”

  “Yes?”

  Anne said nothing. Miss Pettigrew allowed about thirty seconds to pass; then she said:

  “Well, the trouble is that we’ve nothing for you to-day. Are you staying with your friends?”

  “No.”

  The very bright blue eyes were not blind to Anne’s change of colour. A brisk voice inquired:

  “And where did you sleep last night?”

  Anne looked up with a hint of humour.

  “I didn’t sleep very much. I sat on the Embankment.”

  “No money?” asked Miss Pettigrew.

  “Eightpence,” said Anne with a little smile.

  “They didn’t send you out with only eightpence?”

  “Oh no. I thought I had plenty—and I’m afraid I squandered it.”

  Miss Pettigrew gave a sharp little nod. “Thought her friends were going to take her in, and then found they wouldn’t,” was her summing up of the situation.

  “Well, that won’t do,” was what she said aloud. “I’ll try and get you in somewhere for to-night. It’s not so difficult at this time of year. It’s the winter that’s the bother. Now, let me see—what can you do?”

  “I don’t mind what I do—to start with.”

  “Any experience?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  The telephone bell rang, and Miss Pettigrew picked up the receiver. />
  “Yes—that’s right. Yes, Miss Pettigrew speaking. What name did you say? Oh, good morning.”

  A buzzing murmur began, and went on for some time, Miss Pettigrew punctuating it with such remarks as “I see,” “Yes, yes,” and “Well, I’m very sorry.” Presently she threw a quick glance at Anne and said, speaking into the telephone:

  “If you will wait for a few moments, I’ll ring you.” Whereupon she hung up the receiver. “That,” she said, “was Mrs. Yates. She always comes to us. She wants a house-parlourmaid.”

  Anne looked hopeful.

  “I could do that,” she said.

  “Without experience?” said Miss Pettigrew, and saw Anne’s colour rise.

  “Yes, I’m sure I could.”

  “I’ll send you to see her. She’s desperate for someone, because the last girl I sent her walked out yesterday without notice. She’s very much annoyed—naturally. It’s not an easy place.” The last sentence was as dry as you please.

  Again a spark of humour kindled in Anne’s eyes.

  “How long do they usually stay?” she asked.

  Miss Pettigrew’s own sense of humour was a quality which she was at some pains to keep under sound control. Her rosy face was quite grave as she replied:

  “From three days to three months.”

  “Why?” asked Anne.

  “That, I think, you’ll have to discover for yourself. They don’t complain—”

  “But they don’t stay.” Anne paused. “I can’t very well afford to pick and choose,” was her conclusion.

  Miss Pettigrew nodded approval.

  “That’s sensible. I don’t give advice; but if I did—”

  Anne gave the encouraging smile which belonged to Anne Belinda Waveney, and not to Annie Jones. It startled Miss Pettigrew a little.

  “I should be very grateful for the advice.”

  “Well, it doesn’t amount to much. I don’t advise, as I said; but if I did, I should say, ‘Just cultivate being a little deaf.’ People who talk a lot don’t always mean everything they say. Don’t be too thin-skinned, and remember that six months’ good character will make it a lot easier for me to get you something better.”

  Anne said “Thank you” out of a really grateful heart.

  Chapter Eighteen

  John drove his car slowly back to town. He drove slowly because he wanted to think. He wanted to stand away from his interview with Nicholas and get it in focus. At present it was so much out of focus as to appear monstrous. The one horrible word “thief” stood out like a deformity thrust right into the lens of the camera; he could see nothing clearly for it, and whenever he looked at it he felt the same old sickness. “Thief”; “prison”—words like these had no reasonable connection with oneself, with one’s family, with the women of one’s family. That they should be brought into relation with them was monstrous.

  He drove in clear, pale sunlight between hedges where the hawthorn blossom hung like a heavy fall of snow. The sky overhead was the pale, pure blue that speaks of clean air and a freshening breeze. There were clouds coming up out of the north-east—clouds like blown feathers, as white as the thorn blossom.

  When he had run ten miles, John had himself in hand. He went over all that Nicholas had said to him, and all that he had said to Nicholas. Then, when he had fixed the detail firmly in his memory, he did what he had set out to do—he stood away and looked at the interview as a whole. The thing that struck him at the end was the thing that had struck him at the beginning—not Anne’s part, but Jenny’s—the amazing number of lies which Jenny had told, and the apparent ease with which she had told them.

  Right away at the beginning Anne gets out of the taxi, and doesn’t turn up in time for the train. Jenny doesn’t wait for her. Jenny and Mrs. Jones go by the train which Anne has missed. And Jenny tells her father that Anne is staying with friends in town. Why? Why on earth didn’t she just say that Anne had missed the train? If she started to tell lies like that on Anne’s behalf, it meant that she knew jolly well that Anne wasn’t coming back, and that she’d got to be accounted for. After that floods of lies—and she must have told them well, or someone would have found out. Nobody did find out until Jenny went away on her honeymoon and left the lying to Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones was obviously nothing like such a good liar as Jenny, and Sir Anthony found out.

  Jenny told Nicholas about Anne a week after their wedding. That was one of the things which had hit John between the eyes. Jenny told Nicholas when they’d been married a week. That meant she’d been feeding Nicholas with lies just the same as she’d been feeding everyone else. She’d been telling him about the nursing home, and Anne not being allowed to see anyone, and the daily bulletin—“Darling Anne’s better to-day. Isn’t it lovely?” or, “Oh, Nicko, Anne’s not so well.” She’d been telling him this—this bunkum—and wailing because Anne couldn’t be her bridesmaid. And then, when they’d been married a week, she had the nerve to tell him she’d been making a fool of him along with the rest of the general public.

  John gave a short angry laugh. He wondered how Nicholas Marr had taken it. And then, quite suddenly, he realized that Nicholas had never looked at the thing at all from this particular angle. Nicholas Marr from his point of view could see only Anne and her impossible offence against her family and against society. Jenny fell into her place as one of those whom Anne had wronged. “Why, he wouldn’t even notice that she’d been lying—he didn’t notice when he was telling me.”

  John, on the other hand, saw Anne and Jenny, and Jenny’s story about Anne as one sees things in a fog. The fog was a fog of lies. The lies were Jenny’s lies, and they plunged the whole story and the whole situation into obscurity. Amongst so many lies, why should anything be true? Why, for instance, should Jenny’s account of what happened before Anne got out of the taxi be any truer than the story Jenny told to Sir Anthony to account for Anne’s non-arrival? Had Anne written to Mrs. Jones, and if so, what did she really say?

  John thought that he would go and see Mrs. Jones. He took the address which Delia had given him from his pocket-book and refreshed his memory. Mrs. Jones was living with a married daughter at 21, Edwin Road, Clapham; and to Edwin Road, Clapham, he accordingly took his way.

  Hedges of flowering thorn are pleasanter to drive between than rows of yellow brick houses all exactly alike. Dirt soon mitigates the offence of the yellow brick, and one house varies from another in possessing, or lacking, an aspidistra; but the general effect is one of a yellowish-grey monotony. Edwin Road may, or may not, have been named in compliment to a great architect. It is quite certain that he can have been very little flattered.

  John found number twenty-one, and knocked on a door whose blistered paint bore witness that this was the sunny side of the street. The window on his left had Nottingham lace curtains, as clean as it is humanly possible for Nottingham lace curtains to be in Clapham. The curtains were drawn across the window, and between them stood an aspidistra in a bright pink china pot. Between the pink china pot and the tightly closed glass of the window was a long, rather debilitated strip of cardboard upon which the word “Apartments” had been printed by hand.

  The door opened and disclosed a plump, pasty-faced woman in a bright blue overall. John inquired for Mrs. Jones, and was ushered into the parlour, where white shavings blocked the fireplace and a funereal black marble clock ticked heavily at the aspidistra.

  The married daughter’s pride in the gentility of this room was evident. She threw a complacent glance at the two armchairs upholstered in crimson plush, which had figured in an auction ten years ago as “Gent’s, plush, easy,” and “Lady’s ditto.” Her eyes also dwelt fondly on the three-legged table—“real mahogany”—upon which there reposed in state a large picture Bible, a bound copy of Good Words, and two photograph albums. Then she turned her head.

  “What name shall I say?”

  “Sir John Waveney.”

  Twenty years before, Mary Jones would have dropped him a curtsey. Mrs. Por
ter ducked her head and—almost—gave at the knees. “My! If I wasn’t took aback!” she said afterwards over an excellent supper of tinned salmon and fresh cucumber. “’Im standing there and saying, ‘Sir John Waveney,’ and I’m sure no one ’ud ’ve took ’im for a baronet.”

  At the time she said nothing, only ducked her head and got awkwardly out of the room. John heard her, heavy-footed on the stairs, and was left with nothing to do but observe his surroundings.

  There was a dark green paper on the walls. Mrs. Porter considered it a good wearing colour. There were striped pink and white antimacassars on the backs of the crimson armchairs. A lustre cup and saucer of a lovely bronze colour sat on the mantelpiece next to the horrible clock and was balanced on the other side by a peculiarly atrocious blue vase with cheap gilt handles.

  John liked the cup and saucer, though he did not know that it was old and good. He was touching it when Mrs. Jones came in with a measured dignity of step. She was rosy, where her daughter was pallid, and she had the firmly buxom figure of a generation whose stays were really stays, and tightly laced at that. Over the stays she wore a black stuff dress, also heavily boned, and a high black stuff collar with buckram in it, and a little turned-over collar of Swiss embroidery. The collar was fastened by a large old-fashioned brooch with a border of plaited gold and a centre of plaited hair. She also wore a thick gold watch-chain and little gold earrings like buttons.

  John turned with a friendly smile, and was fairly startled by her air of respectful hostility. She shook hands with him, and her hand was cold, plump, and limp. He didn’t know quite what to say or where to begin, and found himself stumbling into some inanity about the weather—something to the effect that it was a fine day.

  Mrs. Jones said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Lovely, driving up—not too hot, you know.”

  Mrs. Jones said, “No, sir.” She had small grey eyes. Her grey hair was very neatly parted in the middle and plaited into a tight, flat bun at the back of her head. Not a single hair was out of place.

  “I’ve just been staying with Lady Marr for the week-end.”