Anne Belinda: A Golden Age Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  “Look here, I want a private detective—inquiry agent—you know the sort of thing.”

  Mr. Lewis Smith sounded rather surprised.

  “What on earth for?”

  “I want one.”

  The surprise turned to mild amusement.

  “All right—have one. But why ask me? We don’t keep ’em on tap.”

  “Don’t be an ass! Can’t you put me on to one?”

  “Well—let me see—you might try Messing. Here’s the address. But, I say, if you’re still on the same tack, for the Lord’s sake go easy.”

  John rang off. He was sick to death of warnings and discretion. He meant to find Anne Belinda, whatever happened or whoever stood in the way. As a preliminary, he found Mr. Messing, and didn’t very much like the look of him.

  Mr. Messing sat at a writing-table with everything very businesslike about him, and a clerk in the outer office. John did not like Mr. Messing’s fingernails, or his tie, or his beady eyes, or his sharply pointed nose; he did not like the way he did his hair. He frowned as he said:

  “I—er—I want to trace someone. That’s the sort of thing you undertake, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Messing opened a most impressive ledger and discreetly covered all the entries with blotting paper.

  “You’d be surprised,” he said affably, “if I were to tell you some of the people we have traced. But that’s the drawback to confidential work like ours—one can’t talk about it, can’t advertise oneself. Of course one’s work gets known. Now”—he poised a ready pen—“you want to trace someone, you said?”

  Mr. Messing had no accent; he had only the sort of voice which is so associated with an accent that there is something startling about its absence.

  “I want to trace a girl called Annie Jones,” said John rather gruffly. (“Beastly place! Perfectly revolting sort of fellow! Absolutely damnable to have him ferreting about after Anne. But must find her. Tell him as little as possible. How little can one tell him?”)

  “Annie Jones—” Mr. Messing poised his pen.

  “Yes. She came out of Holloway yesterday.”

  “Have you been to the police?”

  “No—certainly not. She came out yesterday, and she went to see some friends in the country, and got back to Waterloo at about half-past six—and her friends are anxious because they don’t know where she is, and they’re afraid she hasn’t got much money.”

  “’M—the friends’ address?”

  “I can’t give you that. It doesn’t matter in the least. All that matters is to find out where she went when she got back to London.”

  “Has she any friends in London?”

  “She hasn’t communicated with them—they don’t know anything. They’re anxious.”

  “’M—description?”

  Beastly—unutterably beastly to have to describe Anne Belinda to a fellow like this. All the same she’d got to be found.

  “Dark hair, cut short.” (He remembered her long, dark plaits with a curious pang.) “Pale face.” (She couldn’t go on being so dreadfully pale as she was when she held his arm and looked at him with blind blue eyes.)

  “Face pale—”

  “Eyes dark blue. Dark lashes.” (They wouldn’t go on being drenched with tears.)

  “Dress?”

  “A grey coat and skirt, and a sort of black cap that hid her hair.”

  “Any marks?”

  The little heart-shaped mole sprang sharply into John’s remembrance; but for the life of him he couldn’t give it to Mr. Messing as a clue. He shook his head, and concluded the interview as quickly as possible.

  Anne’s height—he knew where she came to against his shoulder; but that was another of the things that one couldn’t come out with. He made a rapid calculation, and offered Mr. Messing five foot five.

  “Very average,” said Mr. Messing. “Very average. Well, Mr.—I don’t know that I caught your name.”

  “Robinson,” said John.

  “Well, Mr. Robinson, we’ll put the inquiry in hand without delay—hospitals, mortuaries, the police, and all the different charitable places; hostels, refuges, and so forth; likewise the prisoners’ aid and similar societies. We’ll go right through them all, and I don’t doubt but what we’ll have news for you in next to no time. Address, please?”

  John gave the solicitor’s address, and departed to ring up Lewis Smith once more and tell him to send on by express messenger any communication for Mr. John Robinson. At his hotel he found a fat bundle of proofs waiting for him, and was glad to take refuge in work.

  It was next day that he remembered with a shock that he had engaged himself to dine that evening with Mrs. Fossick-Yates—the Mrs. Fossick-Yates. “And she’ll talk about women’s wrongs, and little Fossick-Yates’ll talk about albinism in toads, and—oh Lord! What a jolly evening we shall have!”

  As a prelude to the jolly evening he spent a very busy day. At intervals he rang up Lewis Smith to know whether Messing had communicated, and on the last occasion was rebuffed in highly unprofessional terms.

  The Fossick-Yates had a flat in one of the least accessible backwaters of London. John, having elected to go there by tube, found that he had to change twice, take a bus, change into another bus, and then walk half a mile.

  There was no lift, and he mounted fifty-five steps in a mood sufficiently far removed from jollity. He had no sooner pressed the electric bell than the door flew open and Mr. Fossick-Yates, eager and hospitable, welcomed him in.

  “My dear fellow—my dear Sir John—this is very nice of you—very nice indeed! Ah, yes. Now, you’ll take off your coat and—Ah, yes, there’s a peg here. I’ll move my cap. Now, let me see—your hat—your hat and scarf—Ah, yes. Come along in.”

  He dropped the scarf which he had taken from John as he spoke, bent to retrieve it, and dropped the hat. It was John who finally hung them up, and was then ushered into the drawing-room and presented to Mrs. Fossick-Yates, a tall and very handsome woman, with hair arranged after a pre-war fashion and a well-cut, rather massive black satin dress, which displayed magnificent shoulders. She shook hands very graciously, and introduced John to “My friend, Miss Webster,” a tall, drooping young woman with bobbed flaxen hair and very large blue eyes which dwelt upon Mrs. Fossick-Yates in a permanent ecstasy of admiration.

  Miss Webster wore an inordinate amount of greenish gauze, which appeared to be wound round and round her after a semi-oriental fashion, and she fairly clattered with bead chains. There was a mother-of-pearl one from Palestine, and another of rough turquoise lumps threaded on gold wire from Kashmir; there was a short necklace of Indian amethyst, and a long chain of Indian cornelian. She also wore a very large brooch of bright blue butterfly wing set in hammered silver, and two large marquise rings in the same startling kingfisher shade of blue. She rattled when she walked.

  They passed into the minute dining-room of the flat, to find soup waiting for them in little earthern pots. A lamp, with a dark red shade, hung down low over the polished mahogany table. Though it was still daylight outside, the thick maroon curtains had been drawn, leaving the greater part of the room to a sort of crimson twilight. The light of the lamp was concentrated on the table; it made the folded napkins look very white and the silver very brilliant.

  Mrs. Fossick-Yates and Miss Webster faced each other across the narrower part of the oval table. The light fell full upon their hands and arms. It caught the red and blue and pearl of Miss Webster’s chains and dazzled upon the large diamond sun which adorned the front of Mrs. Fossick-Yates’ black satin dress; it left their faces in shadow. John and Mr. Fossick-Yates, with the length of the table between them, found even their plates in a state of semi-eclipse. John slid his forward into the light, and was inwardly amused to see that his host instantly followed his example.

  Whilst they drank their soup Mrs. Fossick-Yates talked to John about criminal law amendment, a subject upon which she discovered him to be completely ignorant. She was just warming to her explanations of
some recent measures when she was obliged to interrupt herself by treading on the electric bell-push as a signal to her parlour-maid that soup was now disposed of.

  John heard the door open behind him, and was aware of a shadowy figure removing plates.

  “Shamefully inadequate though these measures have been, they have, in some degree, served to call public attention to a subject which is culpably neglected by a majority—a disgracefully large majority—of those who have the vote.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Miss Webster, swaying forward into the light.

  “The condition of ignorance—By the way, we are teetotallers. Barley-water is so wholesome. Annie, the barley-water to Sir John—so rich in vitamins! Frederick, the fish is in front of you; will you help it? As I was saying, the dense and culpable ignorance—”

  John was left with the sound of many rolling words. He ate some remarkably fishy fish, and washed it down with a glutinous substance flavoured with lemon. He had never tasted barley-water before, and concluded that he had no quarrel with water, but preferred barley in soup.

  Mrs. Fossick-Yates went on talking. She talked about the Coal Strike, and Communism, and the terrible state of Russia, and prison reform, and temperance legislation, and the wrongs of women; and Miss Webster clanked ecstatically; and whenever he possibly could, Mr. Fossick-Yates talked across the table about reptiles. In its lighter moments the conversation recurred to food values, and John learned without interest that apples were now considered useless, and that oranges and lemons were the acme of good living. He found himself disliking Mrs. Fossick-Yates more than he had ever disliked a human being before. Without thinking very much about it he had always considered himself progressive; but as Mrs. Fossick-Yates went on talking, he began to feel ferociously reactionary.

  “Isn’t she wonderful?” said Miss Webster in an undertone.

  “When I was in Cornwall in eighty-nine,” said Mr. Fossick-Yates hurriedly, “I came across some very curious—”

  The diamond sun surged into the light as Mrs. Fossick-Yates leaned forward.

  “I will send you a card for both meetings, and I am sure you will find them very stimulating and informative.”

  “Oh yes!” said Miss Webster.

  “Some very curious, almost, if I may say so, legendary—nay, perhaps wholly legendary—”

  “The chief speaker on the earlier date will be my friend, Jane Caradoc. You are, of course, familiar with her writings.”

  “Wonderful!” said Miss Webster. The cornelian chain slipped into the sauce to which she had just helped herself, and she retrieved it with some confusion.

  “There were distinct traces,” said Mr. Fossick-Yates, bringing his bald head well into the circle of light, “distinct traces of—er—er—a belief in the survival up to a fairly recent date of the larger reptilian forms—”

  “Barley-water, sir?” said a voice at John’s elbow. A hand and a crystal jug emerged from the darkness behind him.

  John tore himself from Jane Caradoc and the larger reptilia in order to repel a second jorum of what he considered the most repulsive drink he had ever swallowed since the day when Blake major had dared him to drink gum and ink. He saw the crystal jug, he saw the hand that held it. He began to say “No, thank you,” and did not know whether he finished saying it or not, because the hand that was offering him barley-water was Anne Belinda’s hand. The little heart-shaped mole midway between thumb and forefinger swam before his eyes. The light passing through the handle of the jug made a rainbow that slid to and fro over the smooth skin. For a moment the rainbow crossed the mole, then slipped away. The hand withdrew.

  John sat dazed, and let the rolling periods of Mrs. Fossick-Yates’ eloquence go by; the drumming of his own pulses was all that he really heard.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The dinner seemed to be interminable. The food was all badly cooked, and, as Mrs. Fossick-Yates continually insisted, exceptionally rich in vitamins. Anne came and went, a slim shadow in the outer circle of twilight. John could just see her, not as Anne Belinda, but as a parlour-maid in a white apron with a bib to it and a mob-cap that covered all her hair.

  He began to be thankful for Mrs. Fossick-Yates’ conversation; it seemed incapable of flagging, and merged without effort into oratory. It would have been dreadful if he had had to talk.

  When Mrs. Fossick-Yates at last rose to her feet, she was loth to leave so attentive a listener.

  “We shall expect you in five minutes,” she said. “Remember, Frederick, five minutes!”

  Twenty minutes later Mr. Fossick-Yates had just got into his stride. He had displayed his specimens, quoted at length from an article he had sent to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and was in the thick of a somewhat involved account of a journey he had once undertaken to the Dolomites, when the door opened and Anne stood on the threshold, a silhouette against the lighted hall.

  “Coffee is served, sir.”

  “Thank you, thank you; in a moment. Tell Mrs. Fossick-Yates we will join her directly. So there we were, my dear fellow, with the train gone and all our luggage in it, and not one of us knowing a word of German. Fortunately, I had some chocolate in my pocket. But there, I’m afraid that we ought to join the ladies. Perhaps”—he sighed and coughed—“perhaps I shall have the opportunity of telling you the rest of the story later on—yes, yes, later on.”

  They found Mrs. Fossick-Yates pouring out coffee in an aloof, offended manner, whilst Miss Webster polished her cornelians with an old-fashioned lace handkerchief.

  “I hope the coffee is not cold,” said Mrs. Fossick-Yates. She handed John a cup. “My husband has no sense of time.”

  “My dear!”

  “None.” She tasted her coffee, and set the cup down rather harder than was necessary. “It is cold,” she said.

  “But then, the evening is so delightfully warm,” said Miss Webster brightly.

  Mrs. Fossick-Yates made the sound which is usually written “Pshaw!” and reared her neck majestically.

  “I would send it out to be heated, but that would scarcely be fair to the servants. I believe in consideration for those who serve us. Thoughtlessness is the key-note of the present age—thoughtlessness and a total lack of discipline. Don’t you agree with me, Sir John?”

  John drew up a chair beside her. He had to find out whether Anne was living here or whether she had just come in for the evening. Suppose she were to disappear again. Suppose she were to go away and hide from him. Did she know who he was? Would she know him if she saw him? He didn’t think so; but he couldn’t be sure.

  He drew up his chair and said perhaps the most tactless thing that it was possible for him to say:

  “Do you keep your servants a long time, Mrs. Fossick-Yates?”

  There was a slight but frosty pause. Conversation with Mrs. Fossick-Yates did not as a rule admit of pauses. John had just began to realize that his question was not a happy one, when the lady said:

  “I think I ought to. But one learns not to look for gratitude in this world, Sir John.”

  “How true that is!” said Miss Webster.

  John racked his brains for something to say. He wanted to ask about Anne, and had just enough sense left to realize that it wouldn’t do. Fortunately Mrs. Fossick-Yates had found the text for a new discourse.

  “The servant problem—” she began, and was launched. She touched lightly on what might be called the historical aspect. “The good old days, Sir John, when mistresses and maids shared, in the stillroom and the kitchen, those domestic labours which have since so unfortunately fallen into disuse and disrepute.” A survey of the years from 1914 to 1918 followed: munitions, high wages, fur coats, grand pianos, preposterous ideas, discontent—these words emerged like drops flung up by a torrent.

  Slightly dazed, John continued to listen.

  Leaving 1918 behind her, Mrs. Fossick-Yates had embarked upon a masterly analysis of post-war conditions of female labour in general, and domestic service in particular. As she approached
her peroration, Anne came in, took the coffee-tray, and went out again.

  John dared not look at her after the one glance which showed her very pale, with dark marks under her dark blue eyes. When the door shut, he said quickly:

  “You seem to have solved the question very satisfactorily as far as your own household is concerned.”

  “Mrs. Fossick-Yates is so wonderful!” said Miss Webster.

  “I hope she may turn out well,” said Mrs. Fossick-Yates. “I hope so—but they very seldom do. Not that I allow myself to be deterred by ingratitude or lack of response. No matter how often I am disappointed, I shall continue to give a helping hand to those who need it.”

  “Did this one come from The Second Chance, dear Mrs. Fossick-Yates?” said Miss Webster.

  John blessed her in his heart.

  “Yes, I always go there. A most admirable society, Sir John, and very well described by its name.”

  “What does it do?” He hoped his voice sounded indifferent.

  Mrs. Fossick-Yates condescended to male ignorance.

  “They give prisoners a second chance—find them employment and so forth. The maid who waited on us at dinner has just come to me from them, and I must say I think she seems promising.”

  “You’re so wonderful with them!” said Miss Webster.

  “I always take a very firm line. I believe it is the only way. I do not believe in beating about the bush; I believe in absolute frankness. I said to this girl just what I say to them all.

  “She’s marvellous with them,” murmured Miss Webster.

  “I said to her, ‘Annie Jones, I am giving you a second chance—I believe in giving everyone a second chance. But I can only offer it to you. It lies with you to take it and make good, or to neglect this opportunity and slip deeper into the mire.’” She paused, and John realized with horror that he was expected to say something.

  He said, “Er—”

  “Of course I am very firm—it is necessary to be very firm. I do not believe in locking things up; it only constitutes an additional temptation. I say quite frankly, ‘Here is a list of the silver, and here is a list of my personal jewellery. The carpets and the bronzes are valuable—Mr. Fossick-Yates’ specimens are not. And I always know to a penny how much money I have in my purse. If anything is missing I shall send for the police at once,’”