not open the window from outside.’
‘Perhaps it was opened for them.’
Mr Cartell stood up. ‘Mr Leiss,’ he said, ‘I consider myself responsible to Mr Period for any visitors who, however unwelcome, come to his house under my aegis. Unless his case is returned within the next twelve hours, I shall call in the police.’
‘You’re quite an expert at that, aren’t you?’ Leonard remarked. He looked at the tip of his cigarette. ‘One other thing,’ he said. ‘I resent the way you’re handling this, Mr Cartell, and I know exactly what I can do about it.’
Mr Cartell observed him with a sort of astonished disgust. He addressed himself to Moppett. ‘There’s no point,’ he said, ‘in pursuing this conversation.’
A door banged, footsteps were heard in the hall together with an outbreak of yapping and long drawn-out whines. A loud, uninhibited voice shouted: ‘Geddown! Geddown, you brute.’ There followed a canine yelp and a renewed outbreak of yapping.
‘Quiet, Li. Quiet sweetie. Who the hell let this blasted mongrel in! Trudi!’
‘I have changed my mind,’ Mr Cartell said. ‘I shall speak to my sister.’
He went out and found her, clasping a frenzied Pekinese to her bosom, kicking Pixie and shouting at her Austrian house-parlourmaid.
‘My God, Boysie,’ she said when she saw her brother, ‘are you dotty, bringing that thing in here. Take it out. Take it out!’
The Pekinese turned in her arms and bit her thumb.
Mr Cartell said with dignity: ‘Come along, old girl, you’re not wanted.’ He withdrew Pixie to the garden, tied her to the gate-post and returned to the hall where he found his sister staunching her wound. The Pekinese had been removed.
‘I am sorry, Constance. I apologize. Had I imagined –’
‘Oh, come off it,’ Miss Cartell rejoined. ‘You’re hopeless with animals and let’s leave it at that. If you want to see me, come in here while I get some stuff on my thumb.’
He followed her into her ‘den’: a small room, crowded with photographs that she had long ago ceased to look at with the possible exception of those that recorded the progress of Moppett from infancy to her present dubious effulgence.
Miss Cartell rummaged in a drawer and found some cotton-wool which she applied to her thumb with stamp-paper and a heavy coating of some black and evil-smelling unguent.
‘What is that revolting stuff?’ asked her brother, taking out his handkerchief.
‘I use it on my mare for girth-gall.’
‘Really, Connie!’
‘Really what? Now then, Boysie,’ she said, ‘what’s up? I can see you’re in one of your moods. Let’s have a drink and hear all about it.’
‘I don’t want a drink, Connie.’
‘Why not? I do,’ she shouted, with her inevitable gust of laughter and opened a little cupboard. ‘I’ve been having a go at the Hunt Club,’ she added and embarked on a vigorous exposé of a kennelmaid. Mr Cartell suffered her to thrust a whisky-and-soda into his hand and listened to her with something like despair.
In the end he managed to get her to attend to him. He saw the expected and familiar look of obstinacy come into her face.
‘I can’t put it too strongly, Connie,’ he said. ‘The fellow’s a bad lot and unless you put your foot down, the girl’s going to be involved in serious trouble.’
But it was no use. She said, readily enough, that she would tackle Moppett, but almost at once she began to defend her and before long they had both lost their tempers and had become a middle-aged brother and sister furiously at odds.
‘The trouble with you, Boysie, is that you’ve grown so damned selfish. I don’t wonder Desirée got rid of you. All you think of is your own comfort. You’ve worked yourself up into a stink because you’re dead scared P.P. will turn you out.’
‘That’s an insufferable construction to put on it. Naturally, I don’t relish the thought –’
‘There you are, you see.’
‘Nonsense, Constance! Will you realize that you are entertaining a young man with a criminal record?’
‘Moppett has told me all about him. She’s taken him in hand and he’s going as straight as a die.’
‘You’ve made yourself responsible for Mary, you appear to be quite besotted on her and yet you can allow her to form a criminal association –’
‘There’s nothing like that about it. She’s sorry for him.’
‘She’ll be sorry for herself before long.’
‘Why?’
‘This cigarette-case –’
‘P.P.’ll find it somewhere. You’ve no right –’
‘I have every right,’ Mr Cartell cried, now quite beside himself with chagrin. ‘And I tell you this, Connie. The girl is a bad girl. If you’ve any authority over her, you’d better use it. But in my opinion your sensible course would be to let her be brought to book and pay the consequences. She’s got a record, Connie. You’ll be well rid of her. And I promise you that unless this wretched cigarette-case is returned before tomorrow, I shall call in the police.’
‘You wouldn’t!’
‘I shall. And the upshot no doubt will be gaol for the pair of them.’
‘You miserable little pip-squeak, Boysie!’
‘Very well,’ Mr Cartell said and rose. ‘That’s my final word, Connie. Good evening to you.’
He strode from the hall into the garden where he fell over his dog. With some commotion, they effected an exit and returned, presumably, to Mr Period’s house across the green.
IV
Desirée wore black for her April Fool’s party. On any other woman of her age it would have been a disastrous dress but, by virtue of a sort of inner effrontery, she got away with it. Her neck, her bosom and that dismal little region, known, unprettily, as the armpit, were all so many statements of betrayal, but she triumphed over them and not so much took them in her own stride as obliged other people to take them in theirs. With her incredible hair brushed up into a kind of bonfire, her carefree make-up, her eyeglass, and her general air of raffishness, she belonged, as Mr Period mildly reflected, to Toulouse Lautrec rather than to any contemporary background.
They had dined. The party had assembled, made a great deal of noise and gone off in pairs by car to follow up the clues. Bimbo was driving round the terrain to keep observation, rescue any couple that had become unintentionally lost and whip in the deliberate stragglers. Everyone was to be in by midnight. Supper was set out in the ballroom and in the meantime Desirée and Mr Period sat over a fire in her boudoir enjoying coffee and brandy. It was, Mr Period noticed, Desirée’s third brandy but she carried her drink with astonishing bravura. He nursed his own modest potion and cosily lamented his fate.
‘Desirée, my dear,’ he was saying, ‘I really don’t know what it is about you, but you have so got the gift of drawing one out. Here am I letting my back hair down in the naughtiest way and about poor old Hal, which is not at all the done thing, considering.’
‘Why not?’ she said propping her feet in their preposterously high heels above the fireplace. Mr Period, as she noticed with amusement, gazed tactfully at the flames. ‘Why not? I found Harold plain hell to live with and I don’t know why you should fare any better. Except that you’re nicer than me and have probably got more patience.’
‘It’s