The Trouble with Harriet

by Dorothy Cannell

  “You have to admit, Uncle Morley”—he spoke with none of his usual flippancy— “that something here smells like week-old fish. That business with your luggage on the escalator and Mr. Price showing up armed and dangerous in Chitterton Fells, although where he fits in with the Hoppers is a puzzler.”

  “And then there’s Mr. Jarrow,” I pointed out.

  Daddy’s cheeks swelled into purple balloons, and his full lips flapped with wounded fury. “I am at a loss to understand how you can all stand there maligning one who never had an unkind word to say about anyone. When I think, Giselle, of how admiring Harriet was when I showed her the photo you had recently sent me and how she so sweetly asked if she might be allowed to keep it, your betrayal stabs me through the heart.”

  “Which photo was that, Daddy?”

  “One of you and Bentwick and the children.”

  “And yet she would not give you one of herself.” There had to be some way of getting through to him.

  “What I want to know, Ellie”—Aunt Lulu’s face was flushed with eagerness— “is what you think Morley was enticed into smuggling into this country. Was it the urn itself? Does it look valuable?”

  “It’s a clay pot, not a thing of beauty or a joy forever.” Freddy, with one of his bursts of sensitivity, added, “No offense, Uncle Morley, old cock.”

  “Oh, you know how nutty people can be.” Aunt Lulu flashed us a knowledgeable smile. “They’ll pay the earth for a Rembrandt they have to hide in a safe. And it’s not always about material value. A nice gentleman I met at Oaklands told me he once paid an astonishing sum to steal an ordinary teacup. Because it had sentimental value to the purchaser.”

  “But it may not be the urn itself, but what’s inside, that’s important.” I sat down on the footstool in front of Daddy’s chair.

  Freddy looked down at me from his lanky height. “Damn! I’m itching to take a look to find out. Meanwhile, do we conclude that the purchaser is living in this area?”

  “But it’s a possibility if we accept the premise that Harriet zeroed in on Daddy because he told her he had a daughter living in Chitterton Fells. Maybe she was a woman who believed in omens. She mentioned the Gypsy, didn’t she?” I opened my hand and saw that I was still holding the button, along with the photo of Harriet, Aunt Lulu had given me. A brown button that looked as if it might have come off a coat. And I was remembering the one my Gypsy had pulled off a loose thread and told me to keep as a good-luck charm.

  My father rose from his chair with a look on his face I had not seen before. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had let out a roar bringing down on our heads not only the ceiling but the entire roof.

  “I will not remain in this room listening to these vile aspersions against the memory of the woman I hold most dear.” He had brought the seat cushion up with him and now shook it off like an infuriated hound before heading with a thunderous stride for the door.

  “But Daddy!” I stumbled up from the footstool and went after him. “What if Harriet is more than a memory? What if she is still very much alive?”

  Chapter 18

  “When did you get to thinking that Harriet is alive?” Ben asked when the drawing door closed on a final glimpse of my father’s wounded back.

  “It took me longer than it should have. I can’t talk about it now.” I was close to tears. “I’ve done this all wrong, left Daddy thinking he’s alone in the world, betrayed on all sides. Why would he believe anything I have to say when he has to know deep down, inside that cocoon of his, that I’ve resented Harriet from the word go? I’m not even sure that my motives are pure. Maybe I’m a horrible, vindictive person leaping at the chance to punish him for walking out on me when I was seventeen.” I went to brush past Freddy, but he wrapped an arm around me and tickled my face with a bearded kiss.

  “I’ll go up to him, Coz. You won’t get anywhere like this. You’ll fall all over yourself apologizing, retract everything, and be back to square one.”

  “My little boy is right for once, Ellie.” Aunt Lulu appeared at my other shoulder. “He and Morley can have a man-to-man talk while you sit down and pour your heart out to Ben and me. Unless,” she added, sounding supremely self-sacrificing, “you would rather I got us something to eat.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Lulu. You’re a rock.” Ben guided her toward the door in Freddy’s wake. “There’s a chicken-and-wild-rice casserole in the fridge that only needs the aluminum foil removed before being put in the oven for half an hour. And if you’d like to make a salad, there are lettuce and tomatoes in the crisper.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to make a loaf of bread as well?” I could hear the petulance in her voice as she disappeared into the hall. At any other time I would have felt sorry for her and the doors that were about to get slammed in the kitchen. Or, in the case of the fridge, left open.

  “We could still run away to France.” Ben held me in his arms, and I could feel him smiling against my hair.

  “I hate being an adult.” I stepped reluctantly away from him. “It must be great to be Aunt Lulu. A child in a woman’s body.”

  “While you, Ellie, take on responsibility for everything that goes wrong in the world, whether it’s war in Afghanistan or high winds over the English Channel.”

  “That’s not true,” I protested, “but I did go at Daddy all wrong.”

  “He was going to be hurt whenever he was faced with the truth.”

  “Does that mean, then, that you really have set aside all your doubts?” I sat looking tearily up at him from the arm of the sofa.

  He stood with his hands in his jean pockets. “Call it deductive reasoning or plain old male intuition, but I’m sure Harriet made a prize chump out of Morley. I’m not sure what his role is, but it’s clear to me that Mr. Price offered Aunt Lulu a lift here because he heard her telling the railway-station employee that she had to get to Merlin’s Court and he knew that’s where your father was staying. He needed to find out if Morley still had the urn.”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted, feeling suddenly more resolute and less wobbly. “Isn’t that saying someone didn’t trust Daddy to fulfill his promise to Harriet and hand over her ashes to the Hoppers?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Even so, why tip us off that there’s something fishy going on?” I plucked at a loose thread in the sofa’s ivory damask. “Wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to get in touch with the Hoppers first to find out from them where the situation stood?”

  “Of course.” Ben shifted me from the arm of the sofa onto one of the seat cushions and sat down beside me. “But I’ve got Mr. Price sized up as a bungler. He shows up in Chitterton Fells a day late. Your father arrived yesterday. Perhaps he had to go back to headquarters because he had forgotten his gun or had lost his list of laboriously written out instructions. Equally stupidly, he probably thought a change of clothes and a pair of glasses enough of a disguise to prevent your father from recognizing him from the airport.” Ben leaned his head back. “I remember talking to a detective inspector once when I was working in a London restaurant, and he told me, ‘We at the Yard may not all be Sherlock Holmeses, but we certainly beat most of the competition.’ “

  “There could be the psychological factor.” I had to raise my voice because the grandfather clock was striking seven. It might have been the reverberations, but for a moment I thought I heard a car engine.”

  “What do you mean, Ellie?”

  “Well”—setting aside auditory distractions— “if you’re right about Mr. Price’s real profession, maybe he thinks of himself as invisible much of the time. Isn’t it supposed to be the mark of a good butler to fade into the background during the performance of his duties? To be just a voice granting admittance to his employer’s presence or a pair of hands carrying in the tea tray? And if the other man at the airport, the one who tried to push Daddy down the escalator, was his boss, Mr. Price would have considered himself on the job at the time.”

  �
�Then let’s say the boss was injured to the point of incapacitation after falling down the escalator. He might have been embarrassed, not to say nervous, about notifying whoever hired him to snatch your father’s suitcase that he’d botched things. What to do? He instructs his butler to stop polishing the silver or inventorying the bed linen and toddle down to Chitterton Fells.”

  “That could explain Mr. Price showing up here a day late. The boss could have been out of it at first with a concussion or frantically trying to find someone more reliable to take over.” I nestled comfortably into the best cushion of all, my husband’s shoulder. “But even if we’re right about Mr. Price and his boss, there’s something that doesn’t make any sense. Why try to snatch Daddy’s suitcase after Harriet had set up her scheme to have him deliver the urn to the Hoppers?”

  “Maybe the boss is as much a burglar as Mr. Price.” Ben gave me a rueful smile. “Could we be dealing with rival gangs both after the same pot of gold?”

  “The clay pot,” I reminded him.

  “Or what’s inside.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Harriet was afraid to bring it through herself for fear of being recognized by the authorities. But she could be reasonably confident of Daddy getting the goods out of Germany and into England without incident. Even his loquaciousness on the subject of Harriet and her final wishes had the potential of being more beneficial than risky. He would be so blatantly genuine and so clearly capable of waffling on indefinitely that the customs people would be eager to push him along and shout: ‘Next!’ “

  “We could drive ourselves up the wall trying to fill in all the pieces.” Ben got up and started to pace. “What we should probably be focusing on is how to convince your father that Harriet is indeed alive.”

  “Then you believe me?” I would have jumped up and thrown my arms around him if the sofa hadn’t held me down, as if having grown a little possessive about having me on its lap.

  “It’s so obvious, isn’t it?”

  “I love it when you give me credit for being brilliant.”

  “And I’m grateful when you don’t ask me how I could have been so thick as not to have seen it for myself. I suppose you wouldn’t consider taking this mutual admiration upstairs and making an evening of it?” He raised an enticing eyebrow. “That wouldn’t be fair to Aunt Lulu, would it? Not after she’s gone to all the trouble of hefting that casserole out of the fridge and putting it in the oven.”

  “Don’t count on it,” I said. “She’s probably put it in the washing machine.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have chicken-and-wild-rice soup. But back to Harriet.” Ben resumed his pacing. “Your father only had Ingo Voelkel’s word for it that she was killed in that car accident. If she had died of natural causes Morley would very likely have asked to see the body. This way he could be persuaded her injuries were so severe she was unrecognizable. It was clever to have set him up with the talk about her mysterious illness so that he was programmed to believe, however much he might rant and rave, in the tragic inevitability of her death. But there could have been another problem in Voelkel telling him that she had succumbed after fighting the good fight. Morley might have insisted on talking to her doctor to reassure himself that nothing could have been done to save her.”

  “The accident story was definitely better.” I hugged my arms around myself because I had grown cold. “And the delay in notifying him would throw Daddy sufficiently off balance so that he would be even less likely to make any difficulties. Saying that Harriet had gone to get the car as a surprise for him was also a nice touch. Pile on the emotions. Turn him into a zombie with only one thought lodged in his head. To get that urn to England and the Hoppers.”

  “I wonder if Harriet and Ingo Voelkel were lovers as well as accomplices and whether there was even a Mrs. Voelkel. She was conspicuous by her absence, wasn’t she? And what about the elderly housekeeper? Was she an accomplice?” Ben had completed his ramblings around the room and returned to place a glass in my hand. “I do seem to keep administering brandy.” He leaned forward to kiss me. “But you look like you need to get a little fire going inside you.”

  “I’ve been wondering about something else.” I answered him after taking a few dutiful sips of what the husband ordered. “It’s about that button.”

  “What button?”

  “The one Aunt Lulu took from Doris or Edith’s handbag.” Putting down the glass on the lamp table, I got up and went over to the mantelpiece. Then, without saying another word, I left the room and crossed the hall to the cupboard under the stairs, where I usually hung my handbag upon returning to the house. A few moments later, I was back, standing in front of Ben with a button in each hand.

  “Do these look alike to you?”

  He bent his head for a closer look. “Yes.”

  “Would you say that they are a match?” I persisted.

  “If you’re asking me, Ellie, if they look as though they came from the same garment, my answer stands. Yes.”

  “What will you say if I tell you that one of them was given to me by the Gypsy who stopped me in the town square yesterday to tell my fortune?”

  “Why did she do that?” Both Ben’s eyebrows went up.

  “She tugged it off a loose thread and told me to keep it as a lucky charm. I think she wanted to drive home the point that it would be a big mistake for us to go to France. She may have been afraid that if Daddy showed up all brokenhearted, we might persuade him to come with us on holiday and that would have delayed things.”

  “And how do you think the Hoppers came by the other button?”

  “From Harriet.”

  “You’re thinking ... ?”

  “That she was the Gypsy?”

  “It fits, doesn’t it? Harriet arrived in Chitterton Fells ahead of Daddy. When she spotted me crossing the square, recognizing me from that photo he had given her, she jumped at the chance to size up whether I was as gullible as my father or to have a bit of malicious fun with me.”

  “Did she—the Gypsy—look anything like that photo of Harriet; the one Aunt Lulu stole from the Hoppers?”

  “I can’t say I spotted any resemblance.” I stood fingering the buttons. “But I didn’t have a chance to study the photo, and now Daddy has taken it up to his room. Anyway, there’s a big difference from looking at a snapshot to seeing someone in person. Also, hair and clothing make an enormous difference. Harriet was a platinum blonde, although that could have been a wig, and I’m sure she was always exquisitely made up for her meetings with Daddy. The Gypsy’s hair was in need of a good wash, and her complexion wasn’t anything to write home about.” I could suddenly see her so clearly. “But she did have brown eyes. As did Harriet, although sometimes Daddy described them as hazel. And there’s something else. The Gypsy was puffing away on a cigarette the whole time she was talking to me.”

  “I don’t remember your father saying that Harriet smoked.” Ben looked as though I had lost him a mile and a half back.

  “No, he didn’t.” I slipped the buttons into my shirt pocket.

  “I’m missing something here.” Ben was now rubbing his forehead.

  “That’s because you’ve forgotten what Daddy told us about that depressing room in Ingo Voelkel’s house.”

  His blue-green eyes narrowed. “Was something said about the dead cat in the picture having died of secondhand smoke?”

  “It’s not likely you would remember.” I reached up to smooth the curls back from his furrowed brow. “The only reason I do is because houses and how they are decorated is my business. I can see that room as clearly as if I had been in it. I can sense the dark weight of the furniture and the carved wooden ceiling, feel the gloom of that horrible picture, and smell the stale fireplace ash and the stink of cigarette butts in the ashtrays.” I shuddered. “It’s unpleasant, isn’t it, to think of Harriet coming back to that house after an evening with my poor, besotted Daddy and sitting smoking one cigarette after the other while gloating to her real lover about how
well things were progressing?”

  The telephone rang out in the hall, but before Ben got halfway across the room, it stopped. Whoever had answered it would either take a message or come to tell us who was calling. I didn’t go into a panic that it was bad news about one or all of the children. At least I was getting more realistic in that regard. My in-laws might be in their seventies, but they still had remarkable energy and would not be dozing in their easy chairs while Tam and Abbey got up to dangerous tricks or Rose decided to crawl off home.

  I reached for Ben’s hand, and we were about to go into the hall together when the door bounced open and Mrs. Malloy stood eyeing us balefully from the threshold. And I’d thought she’d gone home hours ago.

  “Well, if this isn’t a pretty state of affairs, both of you here and neither one could get your legs moving to answer the phone. “There I was just about to take a break from studying me script when I smelled the lovely aroma of burning chicken and fancied I could just about swallow a mouthful. If it went down quick with a glass of gin. Then there it goes—that bloody ting-a-ling-a-ling. And not another soul in the hall to say, Mrs. M. you didn’t ought to go straining yourself lifting that receiver.”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “Oh, now you want to know!” Mrs. Malloy teetered forward on her ridiculously high heels and encamped in the nearest chair. “And never a word said about it being written all over my face that I’ve just suffered the most terrible shock.” Ben and I both opened our mouths, but she steamed ahead. “Some of us is more sensitive than others, Mrs. H., and being who I am, I’m going to fall right to pieces if someone don’t put a drink in my hand this minute.”

  “Give her the gin bottle, forget the glass,” I told Ben.

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort,” he countered. “Mrs. Malloy, pull yourself together and tell us about that phone call.”

  “You’re wonderful when you’re being masterful.” She smiled dreamily for a split second before pulling her frown back together. “Well, if you’re going to drag it out of me without a thought to how I’m feeling, I’ll tell you. It was Mrs. Potter ringing up to say she’d just been talking to her sister, Mrs. Blum, that runs Cliffside House, that B and B right near the Old Abbey. And there’s been a terrible accident. A car went off the road. Right down to the beach. That’s not something anyone walks away from with a sprained wrist.” Mrs. Malloy looked at me with real terror in her eyes. “It’s a terrible thing, and don’t think I’m not sorry for whoever was in that car. But, Mrs. H., what if it was Lady Grizwolde and I have to take over the role of Malicia Stillwaters for the entire run of Murder Most Fowl. Could be I’m just feeling peaky, but what if I’m coming down with a bad attack of stage fright?”