In the Teeth of Adversity

by Marian Babson

  “There was something wrong,” I finished instead.

  “Such as?” Gerry raised an eyebrow. For a moment, he nearly raised his spoon, but he noticed Pandora’s head cock alertly just in time.

  “She was wearing her coat,” I said slowly. “And perhaps she had just come in, but ...”

  “But what?” I had Gerry’s complete attention now, and Pandora dived into his egg again. With a resigned shrug, he pushed the plate toward her, so that she could eat it comfortably without stretching. “It was nearly finished, anyway,” he said. “What about Adele?”

  “She wasn’t carrying anything,” I said. “That big bag we’d both noticed – she didn’t have it. And it wasn’t dropped at the head of the stairs or the door of the surgery, or anything. She just plain didn’t have it.”

  “Meaning,” he said thoughtfully, “she’d been back in the house longer than she claimed she had. Long enough to go to her room and put her bag away. Perhaps even take her coat off. Then, after she discovered the body, she rushed back and put her coat on before giving the alarm, to make it look as though she’d just come in.”

  “Either that,” I said, “or she got rid of the bag while she was out. Disposed of it, or stashed it away somewhere.” I got up and went to the kitchen cupboard for more coffee.

  “Making the question: What was she smuggling out of the house in that bag?”

  The phone rang. Since he was nearest, Gerry answered it. I took a look at his face and went back to get more coffee for him, although he looked as though he needed something stronger.

  “I see,” he said noncommittally into the receiver. His expression grew progressively more thoughtful. I gathered he wished he had not picked up the phone; or, having done so, had taken the precaution of answering in a foreign accent, the better to maintain that it was Chang’s Peking Laundry or Antonio’s Flamenco Trattoria. I began to suspect that I knew who must be on the other end of the line.

  “Yes, well, we’ll see what we can do,” he said, even less enthusiastically. “We can’t promise anything, of course.” He listened again in silence, then repeated, “We’ll see what we can do,” and cradled the receiver.

  He sat there and looked at it glumly for a moment, then raised his head to demand of me, “Are we wife-minders?”

  “Probably,” I said. “What’s the bad news?” Gerry drew a long, shuddering breath. “That was Zayle on the line.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t thought for a moment that it had been anyone else.

  “Adele has left him, yet again,” Gerry said. “He thinks she’s heading back for those friends on the coast. All” – he was heavily ironic – “he wants us to do is nip across the street, patrol Charing Cross Station until she arrives, nab her, and escort her back home.”

  Well, we had faced more unreasonable requests from clients in our time. I sighed heavily.

  “Do you think,” Gerry asked, “it might help if we found new offices? Away from all Main Line stations?”

  “That would be the signal” – I went to collect my coat – “for every client we possess to immediately want parcels picked up, friends met, children seen off to school, and any other damned thing you can think of, at every railway station in town. Just thank your stars that Adele’s friends live in the right direction. We might have had to chase to Victoria or Euston.”

  “I don’t see why we should have to do it.” Gerry was still mutinous.

  “Think of it this way,” I said. “How would it look if the suspect’s – our client’s – wife walked out on him at this crucial stage? No one would exactly interpret it as a vote of confidence – least of all, the police. And when you think of the way it would look to the public, if the press got hold of it – as they would –”

  “All right, you needn’t labour the point.” Gerry got up slowly. “But for God’s sake, let’s try to nab her before she gets us within pushing distance of any of those trains.”

  We caught up with her at the left luggage lockers. She didn’t see us coming, being too occupied in searching through her handbag for the key which had obviously slipped to the bottom and lost itself in the litter of lipsticks, cosmetics, other keys, pens, loose coins, and all the other debris peculiar to the bottom of women’s handbags.

  We came up silently behind her and stood one on each side until she surfaced triumphantly with the key with the plastic numbered disc on the end. Then Gerry stepped forward.

  “Allow me.” He took the key from her hand and glanced at the number, looking to match it with the row of lockers.

  She turned, as though to run, but I was blocking her on the other side.

  “Here we are.” He snapped open the locker and pulled out the case. I saw his eyebrows lift as he grunted in sudden surprise at the weight. “What do you have in here – the family silver?”

  “You can take it back to him.” Adele’s immediate response betrayed that Gerry’s guess had not been far off the mark. “But I’m not going back. Not even if you carry me!”

  We met each other’s eyes over her defiant head, mentally visualizing trying to carry a struggling redhead through Charing Cross Station. She’d probably scream, too – and I knew how penetrating that could be. We’d be lucky if we got off with a seven-to-ten-year sentence.

  “Just as you please,” Gerry said absently. His gaze roved to the noticeboards and I saw it linger on one advertising the Sealink Ferry to France from Folkestone. Even more absently, he hefted the case again, testing its weight. I knew his mind was busily following the same line as my own. Adele had packed valuables, rather than clothing. It was a coincidence that she had friends on the coast, but that was not where she had been intending to go.

  Without taking her handbag away and checking it – a move she would resist as strongly as being removed from the station – we couldn’t be sure, but I’d have bet she was carrying her passport. She could disappear on the Continent, selling off the valuables until she had found an alternative means of earning her keep – or until she judged it safe to return to England. Perhaps then she would go to her friends, but that was not her primary destination right now.

  Had Zayle known that? Was that why he had sent us to find her and bring her back? Or had he wanted the return of whatever valuables she had packed in that case? More to the point, was he going to get what he wanted? So far as I was concerned, if it entailed a pitched battle with Adele the length of Charing Cross Station, she was as good as on that ferry right now.

  I should have had more faith in Gerry. Just as Adele took a long, measuring look along the route to her train platform, as though considering her chances if she were to make a sudden break and sprint for the train at the last moment, Gerry sighed.

  “I must say I admire you,” he told the startled Adele. “I didn’t know they made women like you anymore. Why, most women, finding out they were secretly engaged to a potential bigamist, would have just written him off and tried to keep the whole episode secret. But –”

  “Bigamist?” Adele’s eyes narrowed.

  “But not you,” Gerry continued firmly. “You loved him and you don’t care who knows it. You’re not sheltering behind your husband. You’re going to stand up and be counted – with the other fiancées.”

  “Other fiancées?” A distinctly unpleasant note was creeping into Adele’s echo. I decided to help the cause along.

  “Hadn’t you heard? The police have turned up two more – and that’s just from the group in the surgery that afternoon. We don’t know what the final score will be when they get around to checking out his outside, er, activities. And of course, the rest of his patients. He had quite a practice, hadn’t he?”

  The gate had swung open and the train to Folkestone was loading now, but Adele had lost interest. Her gaze was fixed somewhere on middle distance and her hands were clenching and unclenching at her sides. I had the impression that, if Tyler Meredith were not already dead, she would have killed him herself at this moment. Oddly enough, it cheered me. I felt she was the type to be
more discreet about her emotions if she had really killed him.

  “We mustn’t keep you,” Gerry said. “You don’t want to miss your train.”

  I thought that was crowding our luck, but Adele gave no indication of having heard him. She seemed to be thinking deeply.

  “We’ll do our best,” Gerry assured her, “to cover your tracks. From the press, I mean. But you must admit, it’s a gift to them. ‘Grieving Fiancée Number’ – do you think they’ll bill her Number One, Two, or Three?” He consulted me briefly before going on. “‘Grieving Fiancée Flees Country. Deserted Husband Faces Fresh Police Grilling – ’ ”

  Adele’s head snapped up proudly. “He did it for me,” she declared.

  “Who did what?” She had lost me.

  “Endicott killed Tyler for my sake. To save me the humiliation of discovering what he was really like. I was blind not to see it before. Dear Endicott. I must go back immediately and tell him that I understand at last. That I’ll forgive him and stand by him.” She whirled about and started for the street exit.

  That one left even Gerry gasping, and he had seen almost every variety of female rationalization.

  He stared after her with a dumbfounded look. “You’ve got to stay single,” he muttered, “it’s the only protection.”

  “Come on.” I picked up the case at his feet and gave him a shove. “She’s getting away. We can’t let her go back to Zayle without us. He’ll think we haven’t been on the job.”

  “The kindest thing we could do for Zayle,” Gerry said grimly, “would be to shanghai Adele aboard that train and tell him we never found her.”

  I rather agreed, but it was too late. “She’d just get the next train back, now that she’s changed her mind. I think we oversold her.”

  “I suppose there’s no way to undo it?” The hopeless note in his voice betrayed that he already knew the answer. He had done his job too well.

  “At least” – I tried to look on the bright side as we sprinted to catch up before she disappeared into the taxi she had hailed – “Zayle will be pleased.”

  “He probably will,” Gerry said. “That man doesn’t know when he’s well off.”

  Adele didn’t speak to us in the taxi and we were too out of breath to sustain much of a conversation, in any case. She had evidently ordered the driver to hurry, for he took corners and shortcuts with an enthusiasm which was more optimistic than realistic.

  It didn’t cheer me any to see a couple of familiar faces lurking outside the Zayle house as the taxi drew up. It was inevitable, of course. Two deaths in the same dentist’s surgery were bound to attract a certain amount of journalistic interest. As Wilde once remarked, although not about patients: “To lose one ... may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” And who wants a careless dentist?

  “Go straight up the steps,” I told Adele. “Don’t speak, don’t answer any questions. Let us do the talking – if we have to.”

  She nodded and I hoped for the best. If she opened her mouth at all, it would be good for a two-column spread. If she gave the sort of statement she’d uttered to Gerry and me, it would make the front page. And where would our client be then? On his way to Wormwood Scrubs, thanks to his devoted wife.

  “You’ve just been out shopping,” Gerry briefed, obviously distrusting Adele’s ability to keep silent as much as I did. “We saw you in the High Street on our way here and naturally stopped to pick you up.”

  Adele nodded again, still with a distant look. I took possession of the case, lest she reach for it from force of habit. Unfortunately, it didn’t look much like a briefcase, but I was prepared to pull the “What elephant?” routine if anyone asked questions.

  Gerry got out first and ran interference for Adele. She followed docilely, saying nothing, although I noticed she turned her head to the best angle as the photographers grabbed their shots.

  I paid the driver and lingered to exchange a few harmless remarks with the press. Not even Royalty goes much on the “No comment” routine these days. There’s nothing more guaranteed to enrage a reporter, and if you won’t comment, he will. Or else he’ll carefully print your “No comment” plus every question he asked leading up to it, leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions – which will be at least twice as libellous as anything he’d have dared to print.

  They took it with fairly good grace, especially when I guaranteed to keep them posted, and I was timing my break for the moment Adele and Gerry got safely inside the house. I should have known things were going too smoothly.

  We had reached one of those pauses in our question-and-answer game when the silence seemed to deepen and stretch out. I had just turned to move away when the front door at the top of the steps opened and General Sir Malcolm Zayle stood in the entrance. He ignored Gerry and gave Adele a cold look.

  “So,” he boomed out, “you decided to come back, did you?”

  Chapter 11

  “General! Sir! General!” I sprinted up the steps, pushing Adele and Gerry into the vestibule. The General fell back before our onslaught. “ ‘Careless talk,’ General –” I reminded him, slamming the door in the faces of a couple of reporters who had bolted up the steps behind me.

  “ ‘Costs lives,’ ” he finished. “Quite right. Quite right.”

  And the life it cost might be his son’s. There was no point in elucidating, however. I leaned weakly against the door and tried to pretend no one was hammering indignantly at it.

  “Quite right,” the General said again. He frowned at the door. “Is that The Enemy out there?”

  “It depends on how you look at it,” I told him. “They’re the press.”

  “Don’t like the press.” His reaction was instantaneous. “Never get anything right. Always misquoting.”

  “Never mind,” I said as the hammering tapered off, “we don’t have to open the door.”

  “Quite right. Let them stay out there.” He snorted. “Pity it isn’t snowing.”

  There were a few halfhearted yodels through the letter flap and then quiet. We had a moment of silence all round, then Sir Malcolm stepped forward briskly.

  “Let me take your case, m’dear, and show you to your room.”

  I relinquished Adele’s case to him, wondering who he thought she was this time. She didn’t appear to know, either. She gave him a noncommittal smile, suitable for an errant daughter-in-law, shy house-guest, or new parlourmaid, and followed him up the stairs.

  There had seemed to be no indication that we should trail along, so Gerry and I stayed where we were, tacitly debating, with lifts of eyebrows, tilts of heads, and twitching of shoulders, whether or not we should deploy ourselves in the waiting room.

  The question was settled for us when Penny appeared at the head of the stairs and motioned for us to come up – quietly. We took the stairs in a tiptoe rush and she led us into Zayle’s surgery and closed the door.

  “I think you ought to see Mr. Zayle,” she said earnestly. “I really think you ought to.”

  Gerry and I looked at each other, then glanced around the surgery. Zayle wasn’t there. Presumably, he’d gone upstairs to greet his returning wife.

  “What do you mean?” Gerry asked.

  At the same moment, I said defensively, “I’m perfectly all right. Did he put you up to this?” That idée fixe of his about my troublesome tooth was becoming a damned nuisance.

  “I just think you ought to see him,” she said to both of us impartially. “That’s all. Before anyone else does, I mean.”

  “What’s the matter?” Gerry asked. “Who else is supposed to see him this morning?”

  “If she can get away from her photography session in time, Morgana Fane is coming. He hasn’t been able to fit her in yet, and I think she’s getting annoyed about it.”

  And who could blame her? Her time was worth considerably more than a society dentist’s. Not to mention the fact that she had considerably less of it in which to gather rosebuds and sitting fees. A few wrin
kles wouldn’t deter Zayle’s clientele, but Morgana Fane’s opportunities to increase her fortune would not continue forever. It was lucky for her that she was marrying well, but some models still like to keep going as long as they’re in demand.

  “Isn’t she super?” Penny sighed. “We had her X rays out yesterday. Would you believe it, she has four capped teeth? Right in front, too. You’d never know it, would you?”

  “That’s the whole idea with caps,” I said, but

  Penny wasn’t paying attention. Her gaze turned to a glossy magazine, open on the desk, with which she had obviously been whiling away Zayle’s absence. Morgana Fane in full colour sprawled across a double-page spread in some crazed designer’s fantasy of what the well-undressed prostitute would wear this year.

  “All her clothes look so lovely on her,” Penny said wistfully. “I wish clothes would look like that on me.”

  “Just remember” – something was niggling at me, but Penny’s misplaced values were niggling more – “she only has to worry about how she looks from the front. You don’t see the back view.

  “In fact” – I warmed to my subject – “it would be highly salutary if all fashion-mad females could see the reverse side of these high-fashion photos. You, too, could achieve perfection in any modest little ten-pound-ninety-five-pence number if you had six safety pins, two clothes pegs, and the photographer’s assistant clinging on for dear life behind.”

  “I suppose so.” Penny relinquished her dream reluctantly. “Anyway, I can get a super medallion like hers. That isn’t a photographic trick.”

  “No,” I agreed, “but if you do get one, just don’t wear it to work. I couldn’t stand looking at it for longer than ten seconds a day –”

  “Ah, there you are, there you are!” Zayle bustled into the surgery. “You’re lucky, very lucky. I’ve had an unexpected cancellation. That means I can take you now.”

  He was looking straight at me.

  “I’m all right.” I backed away. “There’s nothing wrong with any of my teeth. They’re all fine.”

  “That’s what they all say.” He shook his head at me in exasperation. “And then they telephone me at two A.M. with a raging toothache and expect me to do something about it there and then.”