the next table, toyed listlessly with the contents of her plate; considering the frugality of her lunch, the performance did her credit. She drank her glass of wine, however, with unaccustomed rapidity, and forthwith asked for another.
“Are you all right, love?” inquired the girl in black trousers, as she brought the second glass.
“Yes, I’m fine, thank you,” said Selena, in a tone of wretchedness bravely dissimulated. “It’s only…” She concluded with a wan smile and a sad little shrug of the shoulders.
“If you’re fine,” said the dark girl, “why are you sitting there not eating anything and looking like a wet Sunday in Highgate Cemetery?” Selena repeated the wan smile and the sad little shrug, throwing in for good measure an understated but moving gesture of the hands. Construing this as an invitation to act as confidante, the girl sat down, facing her earnestly across the wrought-iron table.
“I wouldn’t like you to think,” said Selena, “that I’m jealous or possessive or anything.”
“Of course not, love,” said the girl in black trousers. “Just who is it you’re not jealous and possessive about?”
Sipping her second glass of wine, Selena explained that she had a friend of whom she was very fond; who was, she believed, fond of her; but who sometimes behaved unpredictably and as if indifferent to her feelings. On the previous evening, although aware that Selena could not accompany her, she had announced an intention to visit Vashti’s House; and she had not returned. “So you’d like to know who she came with?”
“I’d like to know who she left with,” said Selena, with some asperity.
The dark girl, it seemed, had been serving in the bar of the discotheque on the previous evening, and might be able to assist; Selena described Julia.
“Strewth,” said the girl, “you don’t mean the woman who dropped things?”
“Yes,” said Selena. “Yes, that sounds like Julia. What exactly did she drop last night?”
“Well, love, you might ask ‘What didn’t she?’” said the dark girl, looking at Selena with what seemed to be a mixture of pity and amazed admiration.
“Oh dear.” Selena’s anxiety, I thought, was only partly feigned. “She does sometimes tend to get a trifle exuberant.”
“Has exuberant got an ‘x’ in it?”
Selena admitted that it had.
“I think your friend’s the woman who put it there.”
The particulars of Julia’s exuberance were so deplorable, it seemed, as to require telling
“If you take my advice, love,” said the dark girl, handing her her change, “you’ll forget about her. All right, so she’s got curves. So’s a roller-coaster got curves — it doesn’t mean you can have a steady relationship with it.”
“You know how it is,” said Selena, “when you’re fond of someone.” With a final wistful smile she took her departure, leaving the dark girl to shake her head in resigned acknowledgment of the power of passion over judgment.
“We weren’t able to hear the whole of your conversation,” said Ragwort when we rejoined Selena in her motor-car. “You’d better tell us the worst.”
“It appears,” said Selena, “that Julia was thrown out. Her conduct fell short of the standards of decorum which Vashti’s expects of its clients.”
“It can’t have done,” said Ragwort. “There aren’t any.”
“There are and it did. The attitude of the management is that they want people to enjoy themselves but they have to draw the line somewhere. They drew it at Julia.” Selena inserted her vehicle into the stream of westbound traffic. “No doubt she was simply trying to enter into the spirit of things and do what was expected of her. But she does seem to have overdone it rather.”
“Did you discover,” I asked, “at what hour she was ejected? And in whose company?”
“At about two o’clock in the morning. And she was still with the parlormaid person — the girl called Rowena. It seems that Rowena was staying in the flat of a friend of hers — a friend of the masculine gender — while he was away on holiday. They apparently intended to go back there and console themselves by drinking his whiskey.”
“Selena,” said Ragwort, perceiving that we were now moving briskly westwards along the Embankment, “where are we going?”
“Mortlake, of course,” said Selena.
Among the amenities of the opulent block of flats in which Rupert Galloway resided was an entryphone device; but our arrival at the main entrance coincided with that of another visitor, who obligingly held the door open without inquiring our business. The lift conveyed us with unnatural smoothness to the top floor of the building.
Neither the first ring at Rupert’s doorbell nor the second caused the door of his flat to be opened to us.
“There’s no one there,” said Ragwort.
“No one who chooses to answer,” said Selena. “Fortunately, however, it seems to have the same kind of lock as the main door to the Nursery.” She began to search for something in her handbag.
“What exactly,” said Ragwort, with a certain apprehensiveness, “is the relevance of the door to the Nursery?”
“I know how to open it without a key. Cantrip very kindly showed me how, in case I accidentally locked myself out. Ah, here we are.” She took from her handbag a credit card widely publicized as ensuring entry to places from which the holder might without its aid be excluded.
“My dear Selena,” said Ragwort, “are you proposing to commit a burglary?”
“Certainly not,” said Selena, dexterously inserting the plastic rectangle between the door and the doorpost. “We don’t intend, do we, when we have entered the flat, to steal or maliciously damage any property, or ravish any woman therein or cause grievous bodily harm to any person?”
“No,” said Ragwort, “of course not.”
“In that case it isn’t burglary. The book about criminal law that I read for Bar exams was quite clear on the point. Ah, that’s it.” She regarded the open door with the satisfaction natural in one who successfully displays a little-used accomplishment.
Cautiously she led the way into the entrance-lobby, and from there, with even greater circumspection, into the drawing-room. The room was expensively furnished and of not unpleasing proportions, though curtains of woven hessian drawn across the full-length windows, shutting out the afternoon sunlight, gave it a slightly funereal look. Selena looked carefully about her, as if Julia might be hidden somewhere behind one of the vast leather sofas or the cocktail cabinet of chrome and tinted glass; but the room was plainly unoccupied.
“I think,” she said, after a pause, “that we ought to try the bedroom.”
The door on our right led to a short corridor, off which there opened the door to the bedroom. Selena tapped on it and received no answer. After a moment’s hesitation, she turned the knob and went in, closely followed by Ragwort. I heard her draw breath rather sharply.
“Oh, lord,” said Ragwort.
On the bed lay Julia, dressed in a small quantity of black underwear and only partly covered by the sheet flung carelessly over her. She lay at an awkward angle, her head thrown back, her dark hair spread in tangled disorder across the pillow, one bare arm trailing limply over the edge of the bed. She looked pale and curiously peaceful.
CHAPTER 9
And was, I need hardly say — though I must confess to a childish hope, unbecoming perhaps to the Scholar, of having aroused in my readers some measure of interesting apprehension — no more than soundly asleep.
Gently awoken by Selena, she appeared pleased by our presence, though less surprised than the circumstances seemed to warrant: she apparently regarded it as natural that Selena should discover her
