The Fingerprint (The Miss Silver Mysteries Book 30)

by Patricia Wentworth

  He allowed himself to laugh.

  ‘I believe it hurts them rather more than it does me.’ He put his arm round her and they slipped into the dance.

  Someone had built on a ballroom at the back of the house. Jonathan’s grandmother was an heiress, and she had six daughters. The ballroom had no doubt assisted her in her determination to supply them with eligible husbands. It stood at right angles to the block of the house, and thanks to a wealth of creeper and a charming formal garden which brought it into harmony with the terrace under the drawing-room windows, it was no longer the eyesore which it had been when it was new.

  The floor was very good, the music delightful, and their steps went well together. She was a little soft, light thing and she could dance. He had a passing wonder as to how she might compare with Georgina Grey. She passed them at the moment, coping with Lord Pondesbury who had a tendency to treat every dance as if it were some kind of a jig of his own invention. In the circumstances Frank gave Georgina marks for the kindness of her smile.

  Mirrie looked up at him and said,

  ‘How well you dance!’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Field.’

  She gave him a dimpling smile.

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t call me Miss Field – I’m just Mirrie. And this is my very first dance.’

  ‘No one would know it. You are very good.’

  She said, ‘I love it,’ in a reverential voice. ‘I wanted to go into ballet, but you have to start so young, and there wasn’t enough money for me to have lessons. Did you ever want anything dreadfully, dreadfully badly and have to give it up because there wasn’t enough money and there simply wasn’t anywhere you could possibly get it from? I don’t suppose you ever did, so you can’t possibly know what it feels like.’

  Frank knew very well, but he wasn’t going to say so. He had been intended for the Bar, and he had had to give it up when his father died. He said,

  ‘It was a pity about that. What are you going to do instead?’

  Her colour rose becomingly. The dark lashes came down and hid her eyes. She said in a murmuring voice,

  ‘Uncle Jonathan is being so kind.’ And then, ‘Oh, don’t you love dancing?’

  They danced.

  Later, when they were sitting out, she stopped suddenly in the middle of some artless prattle about this and that to lift a fold of the white frilly skirt which billowed out over the low chair and say,

  ‘Do you know, this is the very, very first dress of my own I’ve ever had.’

  He was stirred to amusement and something else.

  ‘And who did the others belong to?’

  She said, ‘They were cast-offs.’

  ‘You mean you had older sisters?’

  ‘Oh, no. They belonged to people I’d never heard about – people who send parcels to poor relations. You don’t know how horrid it is to get them.’

  ‘It might have been much more horrid if you hadn’t.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been.’ She had a mournful and accusing look. ‘You don’t know how horrid it was. Some of the things were so ugly, and they didn’t really fit. I expect some of them belonged to Georgina. She says no, but I expect they did. She is older than I am, you know, and a whole lot taller, so her things would always have been much too large. They used to put tucks in them all over and say I would grow into them in a year or two, but I never did. I expect they kept me from growing. Don’t you think if you hated a thing very much it might keep you from growing into it? There was a perfectly horrid dress with yellow stripes exactly like a wasp, and I had to wear it whether it fitted me or not.’ She gave a heartfelt sigh and added, ‘I did hate my relations.’

  Frank leaned back lazily. It was not the first time that he had been the recipient of girlish confidences. After a long apprenticeship with female cousins they no longer embarrassed him.

  ‘I don’t know that I should make a practice of hating them. I have hundreds, and they all mean well.’

  He was thinking that if she didn’t know which side her bread was buttered she had better make haste and find out. And then with a touch of cynicism he became aware that she knew very well. There was a soft agitation in her voice as she said,

  ‘Oh, you didn’t think I meant Uncle Jonathan – you couldn’t! I wouldn’t mind anything from him. He is different.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Of course he is! He doesn’t give me old things, he gives me lovely new ones. He gave me a cheque to buy anything I wanted – real, real money to go into a shop with and buy anything I wanted! And a string of pearls for my birthday! Look at them – I’ve got them on! Aren’t they lovely? And he said this was to be my party as well as Georgina’s!’

  It certainly looked if Uncle Jonathan was spreading himself. Frank said idly,

  ‘And what about Georgina – is she kind too?’

  Mirrie fingered her pearls and looked down at the white frills. She said in a childish voice,

  ‘She is very kind.’

  It wasn’t until a good deal later that he arrived at dancing with Georgina Grey. She made a charming hostess and there was a good deal of competition, but in the end he got his dance and enjoyed it. Voice, manner and step were easy, graceful and charming. He remembered Cicely Abbott’s old nurse saying of somebody that everything she did became her. He thought it might have been said of Georgina Grey.

  He was prompted to turn the conversation in Mirrie’s direction.

  ‘Anthony tells me she has lately come to live with you.’

  Georgina said, ‘To stay with us.’ And then, ‘I think she will stay on.’

  ‘She was telling me that she would have liked to go in for ballet.’

  ‘Yes, but it has been left too late.’

  ‘She dances very well.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But ballet is quite a different thing. You have to start when you are about seven, or even earlier, and it means hours of practice every day for years.’

  ‘I suppose it does.’

  He was struck by the serious considering note in her voice. And then they were talking of something else. Mirrie Field as a topic didn’t crop up again.

  One thing he did see which he was to remember afterwards. Everyone was breaking off and streaming in to supper. He had Cicely Hathaway as a partner, and just as they nicely settled she said that she had lost her handkerchief. She knew just where it would be, and he went back for it – ‘The study, Frank. Grant and I were in there and I was doing my face. It’s one Gran gave me, with real lace.’ He found it easily enough, and then as he stood with it in his hand he heard a small tapping sound from the direction of the window. He pushed Cicely’s handkerchief into his pocket and drew back the nearest curtain. It was the one which screened a glass door on to the terrace. The door was ajar and the sound which he had heard was the sound of it just touching the jamb and swinging out again. But as he drew the curtain back it was opened by something more tangible than the wind. Mirrie Field stood on the step in her white dress, staring up at him with her eyes quite wide with fright.

  She said, ‘Oh!’ and put her hand to her throat.

  Well, girls did slip out at a dance, though it was a pretty cold night for that fluffy white dress. But where was the man? You don’t go out alone into icy gardens. At least if you do, it is sheer lunacy.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry I gave you a start. Come along and have hot soup. You must be frozen.’

  Mirrie went on looking at him.

  ‘I – I was hot – I just went out.’

  They went back into the dining-room together. He didn’t think of it again until quite a long time afterwards.

  FIVE

  IT WAS AN agreeable weekend. Frank and Anthony walked over to Abbottsleigh in the afternoon, and went on to have tea with Grant and Cicely Hathaway, after which Anthony returned to Field End and Frank Abbott went on to town by train from Lenton. The infamous Cressington case broke next day, and he became too much occupied with it to have time or thought for anything else until, as suddenly and drea
dfully as it had begun, it ended and the Yard could breathe again. Chief Inspector Lamb lost a stone in weight, a fact which he resented though he could do very well without it. What annoyed him more was that he had lost his sleep, a thing so unusual as to have the most unhappy effect upon his temper. Frank emerged from the affair with a good deal of kudos and the knowledge that he had probably been as near to death as he ever would be until he actually died.

  It is curious to reflect that whereas on the stage an actor is within the limits of his own play and is always aware of what kind of play it is – comedy, tragedy, melodrama, or farce – in real life he has no such knowledge and finds himself sliding from one play to another, with the players continually changing, the cues uncertain, and the plot extremely difficult to follow. After a pleasant preliminary scene at Field End in what appeared to be drawing-room comedy the Cressington case was stark melodrama. Frank had left one theatre and been hurried on to the boards in another. But the Field End play went on without him.

  Maggie Bell comes into the story at this point. She had been a cripple ever since a car knocked her down in Deeping village street just before her twelfth birthday. She was now a year or two over thirty, and she had not grown or developed very much since what she always spoke of with some pride as ‘my accident’. She could not set her foot to the ground, and she never went out. But that was not to say that she did not know all about everything that went on in Deeping and its surroundings. Her main sources of information were three. She lay all day on a couch drawn up to the window in the front room over Mr. Bisset’s Grocery Stores, the name imposed by its owner, an ambitious little man, upon what had started life as a general shop. In addition to the Groceries of the title Mr. Bisset sold overalls, strong lads’ and men’s, vegetables and fruit in season, jams and preserves concocted by Mrs. Bisset, together with the liquorice bootlaces once popular but now extinct in most parts of England. Mrs. Bisset produced them from a recipe of which she boasted that it had come down in her family for two hundred years and during that time had never been imparted to anyone who was not a blood relation. On the days when she was concocting this delicacy the smell would penetrate not only to the two rooms rented by Mrs. Bell, but would pervade the village street for some fifty yards in either direction, which, as Mrs. Bisset remarked, was as good an advertisement as you could have.

  Sooner or later everyone shopped at the Grocery Stores, even what Mrs. Bell called the County, since it may happen to anyone to run out of hairpins, safety pins, knicker elastic, to say nothing of apples, onions, tomatoes, or one of the practically universal breakfast cereals. Whenever it was possible to have her window open Maggie could hear everything that was said on the pavement below, where people would stand and gossip as they came and went. She had the sharpest ears in the county and was proud of the fact. On a fine day she would look out and wave, and nearly everyone would wave back. Mrs. Abbott from Abbottsleigh always did. She would look up and smile ever so nicely. But Miss Cicely, that was Mrs. Grant Hathaway now, she would come running up the stairs with that little Bramble dog of hers and half a dozen magazines and books for Maggie to pass the time with. Clever that Bramble dog was. What they call a dachshund – long body and short legs and ever such a knowing look in his eye. Went with Miss Cicely everywhere, and she’d talk to him just as if he could understand every word.

  Maggie’s second source of information came from the fact that her mother took in dressmaking. Clever at it too, and needed to be since it was all she and Maggie had to live on except what came from the accident money. Very smart ladies used to bring her things to copy or to be altered. Mrs. Abbott had brought her in old Lady Evelyn Abbott’s wedding-dress to make over for Miss Cicely when she was married. It was the loveliest stuff that Maggie had ever seen in her life – pounds and pounds a yard it must have cost. And wasted on a little brown thing like Miss Cicely – only of course that wasn’t a thing she would say except to her mother, and when she said it to her Mrs. Bell right down snapped her nose off.

  The third and most important means by which Maggie kept in touch with everything that went on lay, quite literally, to her hand. It was the telephone. She had it on a long flex so that it could stand on the table by her sofa all day and be moved to beside her bed in the evening. It is not to be supposed that there were many people to ring her up, or that Mrs. Bell could afford any but the most necessary outgoing calls. There were of course appointments for fittings, and enquiries as to the progress of work in hand, but the strength of Maggie’s position lay in the fact that Deeping was furnished with that valuable aid to knowledge, a party line. When the Eternity Ring case was holding the neighbourhood in a state of horrified suspense Maggie had been able to follow the proceedings from the first mysterious call for Mr. Grant Hathaway by a strange woman with a French accent, through two murders and Mr. Hathaway’s impending arrest, down to the final and most startling climax.

  She had naturally been a good deal interested in the dance. A good many of the guests had had new dresses for it, but some of the ladies came in for alterations to what they already had, Lady Pondesbury for one. You’d think she’d be sick, sore and weary of that old black satin of hers, but in she’d come time after time, and always the same story, somehow or other it had got to be let out. Any money they had went on horses – and why not if they liked it that way? Mrs. Abbott, she had brought in her black lace, and a nice dress it was and didn’t need very much done to it – just a little bringing up to date as you might say. Miss Georgina had had a new dress, a lovely silver one. Maggie would have liked to see her in it. She did hear Miss Mirrie Field talking about it on the telephone. The day before the dance it was. She put through a London call, and it was a man she was talking to, telling him all about the party and how excited she was. She said her uncle had given her a cheque and told her to get a real nice dress, and she had, but it wasn’t as grand as Georgina’s – ‘Hers is silver and ever so becoming, and mine is white with a lot of little frills. Don’t you wish you could see me in it?’ And he said, ‘Perhaps I shall,’ and Miss Mirrie said, ‘Oh no, you mustn’t do anything silly.’ And he said, ‘I’ve dropped you a line. And you remember what I told you about my letters?’ Miss Mirrie said oh, yes, she did, and the man said, ‘Well, you go on remembering it, or you’ll be finding yourself out on your ear!’ and he rang off. Not at all a refined way to talk, Maggie thought. She was surprised at Miss Mirrie putting up with it. She had kept a sharp look-out to see if there were any more of those calls, but if there were she missed them.

  The dance was over and there was just the usual amount of ringing up about it afterwards and saying how much they had enjoyed it, but nothing out of the way interesting. Not that week.

  It was on the Monday morning a week later that Georgina Grey received her first anonymous letter. It lay beside her plate on the breakfast table, and since she was the first to come down she was alone in the room when she opened it. When she thought about this afterwards she was grateful. She stood there tall and fair in a grey skirt and a twin set of primrose wool, and for a moment she just didn’t accept what was happening. She had torn open a cheap flimsy envelope and dropped it on to the table. She held a cheap flimsy bit of paper in her hand. It had lines on it. In spite of the lines the writing was very bad. She got as far as that, and then her mind seemed to stick. There were words on the paper, but it didn’t seem as if she could take them in. Her mind shut itself against them, and quite without conscious thought she turned the sheet over to look for the signature, but the writing went on right down to the foot of the page, and then it just left off. There wasn’t any signature.

  She turned it over again and began to read from where it seemed to begin at the top of the page. There wasn’t an address, and there wasn’t a date. There wasn’t properly speaking any beginning at all. It just started.

  ‘You think pretty well of yourself, don’t you, Miss Georgina Grey? You’ve been brought up soft, and I suppose you think you’ll go on living soft to the end of the
chapter. You won’t. You’ve got things coming to you that you’re not going to like. Some of those who are underneath now will be on top, and you will be underneath. When you have never had anything to speak of you don’t miss it so much, but when you have always had everything and then quite suddenly you don’t have anything at all you miss it like hell. Up with the rocket and down with the stick, that’s you. I suppose you think people don’t see how you treat your cousin – looking down your nose at her and being patronising and giving her your cast-off clothes. You needn’t think it doesn’t get talked about, or that there aren’t quite a lot of people who are getting up to boiling-point about it. And all because you want everything for yourself and because she is prettier than you are and with much more taking ways, and because A. H. and others have begun to think so. And that hits you where it hurts, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, there will be lots more coming! People don’t like to see a girl spiting another girl and trying to push her down just because she is younger and prettier, and because you think J. F. is getting too fond of her as well as A. H.’

  Georgina read it right through to the end. Then she put it back into the envelope. Her first feeling was one of bewilderment. You heard about anonymous letters, but you didn’t get them. They were like a lot of things which you read about in the papers. They happened to other people. They didn’t happen to you. It took her a little time to assimilate the fact that this was happening to her. It was as unexpected and as unbelievable as if she had been slapped in the face in the street by a stranger. She had to go on from there to wondering why anyone should do such a thing, and to the further question of who could have done it. Who could possibly have written her a letter like that? It must be someone who knew about her and about Mirrie, but she couldn’t think of anyone who would do such a thing. She stood there by the breakfast table with the cheap envelope in her hand and felt as if she had missed a step in the dark.

  When she heard voices in the hall she went out quickly by way of the service-door and up the back stairs to her room, where she put the letter into a drawer. After which she came down again to find Mirrie and Anthony in the dining-room. They were standing very close together. No. wouldn’t allow that into her thought – it was Mirrie who was standing very close to Anthony. It was just a way she had of coming right up to anyone – to him, or to Johnny, or to Jonathan Field – to stand like that with her head tilted, stroking a coat-sleeve and looking up. It was an artless, unconscious trick and very engaging, but just at this moment Georgina could have done without it.