“Mrs. Haskell hasn’t been on the scene long.” Mrs. Malloy stood to my right on her high heels looking the picture of truth and rectitude. This was the moment for me to take a stand. Instead, as the floor began to tilt like the
“Looks a decent person. Nicely enough dressed for a woman of her stamp. Neat sort of hairstyle. Nothing too modern.” Her ladyship was stripping off her gloves as she spoke and stowing them away in the handbag. “And who might you be, if it’s not too complicated to explain?”
“Roxie Malloy, Mr. Jugg’s Girl Friday.”
Her ladyship appraised Mrs. M. in all her blonde-headed glory. “My pleasure. Although I must say that skirt’s far too short and I have always believed pink to be a debutante’s color. Still, I suppose one might justifiably suggest I am out of step with the modern generation.”
Mrs. Malloy, who had abruptly stopped preening, brightened.
“My late husband, Sir Horace, occasionally cautioned me to moderate my opinions.” Her ladyship shifted her carpet bag from her black-clad knees to the floor. “But we will however, come to him in due time. As I was saying I hadn’t anticipated confiding in more than one pair of ears. To be frank, it never crossed my mind that Mr. Jugg would have a secretary or whatever they’re called these days, let alone a partner.” Lady Krumley looked around the office with its bare bones furnishings, uncurtained, night-darkened windows and the motley assortment of plants. Even my blurred vision took in the fact that the plastic ones looked as if they needed watering and the real ones appeared horribly fake. Clearly Lady Krumley, who undoubtedly had her own conservatory back at the ancestral hole, as my cousin Freddy would call it, was under no delusions that she was visiting Kew Gardens.
“The person who gave me the direction to this detective agency advised me that Mr. Jugg was very much a lone wolf,” she continued in an increasingly robust voice. “But we never know all there is to know about anyone, do we, even when the relationship’s of considerable duration?”
Mrs. M., for reasons I was unable to fathom, again looked put out. But she kept her voice affable. “Now don’t you go being afraid, old ducks-meaning your ladyship-to spill the beans about what brings you here,” She eyed the butts in the ashtray, but whether because she suddenly noticed they looked and smelled disgusting or because she was dying for a puff, I couldn’t tell. “Discretion’s the name of the game here at Jugg’s Detective Agency. Always has been, always will be. Milk’s been in the business a long time.”
“Milk?” Her ladyship raised an inquiring eyebrow. “I wasn’t given to understand he was also in the dairy business.”
“It’s his nickname.” I cautiously supplied this tidbit.
“Ah, yes. I do see.”
“Course only them closest to him use it regular like. But call him what you will. Doesn’t mean the man don’t know that one wrong word in the wrong ears could have some very nasty results.” To illustrate her point, Mrs. Malloy drew a finger across her throat. A gesture wasted on her ladyship who directed her hooded gaze at me.
“I suppose it helps, in that regard, his partner being a mute.”
Which of course completely took my voice away. Not so Mrs. Malloy. She tossed her blond locks, fluttered her heavily blackened lashes and giggled like a fifteen-year-old. “Got a sense of humor, haven’t you, ducks? Course Mrs. Haskell can talk. Shell-shocked, that’s what she is at this minute. Just come in from a nasty showdown between a husband and wife over some missing property. Very unpleasant these domestic situations can turn. I’ll not say no more, but I’m sure you can picture it.”
Clearly Lady Krumley could. The bullet holes in the library wainscoting, the bloodstains on the Persian carpet, the family dog covering its face with its paws in the corner, to say nothing of the body that would have to be temporarily put in the sideboard if the bridge game was to begin on time. I made the mistake of looking at the ashtray and another chance to speak up was lost.
“Horrible stuff we see in this business.” Mrs. M. looked positively blissful. “Still, no disrespect to Milk, some jobs in this business are best left to women is what I say. Can’t expect a man to really understand the female viewpoint, now can you?”
“You may be right.” Her ladyship’s eyelids narrowed. “Even my dear Horace was not always sensitive to my way of looking at things. Indeed, part of my reason for being late for my appointment was that I lost track of time wondering if Mr. Jugg would dismiss my fears as flights of feminine fantasy.”
“There you are, then!” Mrs. Malloy was at her most triumphant. “All turned out for the best, didn’t it? How about I fix you a good stiff drink before we get started? And don’t be afraid to go ahead and smoke if you fancy a ciggy. Mrs. Haskell and me aren’t ones to pass judgment. Would be the pot calling the kettle black, wouldn’t it?”
It was all too much for me. Prying myself away from the desk I fled in what I hoped was the direction of the loo, somehow in the process managing to drag Mrs. Malloy along with me. She mumbled something over her shoulder, and I caught a glimpse of Her Ladyship’s startled black gaze before I found myself again hanging over the washbasin. Oh, the blessed chill of the porcelain! For a moment I prayed for the guillotine to come slicing down on my neck, and then all at once-miraculously-I was whole and healthy again. Amazing! The floor didn’t tilt. The room didn’t spin. And even Mrs. Malloy’s aggrieved voice did not make me wish to take a nosedive into the toilet and be flushed away into oblivion.
“Well, I hope you’re proper ashamed of yourself, Mrs. H., giving that poor little old lady the silent treatment.”
“I didn’t feel well.”
“Rubbish! You look proper blooming to me this minute. Never been so shown up in me life, I haven’t! And after me going and promoting you too! Anyone else would have made you the secretary and me Mr. Jugg’s partner. Unselfish to the core, that’s always been me trouble. But there’s no use standing here crying over spilt milk.”
I didn’t ask if there was any pun intended. “Lady Krumley isn’t little,” I said. She has to be five foot eight in her bare feet. And I doubt very much given the title that she’s poor.”
“There you go, picking me words apart like a sink full of lettuce! We’ve got to get back in there before she gets the wind up and disappears into the night.” Mrs. Malloy stood like Justice on a pedestal, but I turned to straighten my hair in the dinky little mirror above the basin, feeling stronger by the minute. There was no way I was going to allow her to intimidate me into posing as a private detective-something I was sure would have nasty legal consequences. One petty criminal in the family was enough, thank you very much.
My cousin Freddy’s mother, Aunt Lulu, had taken up shoplifting years ago when her women friends chose needle-point or bridge as a hobby. To date she had not found herself in the dock facing a judge wearing a wig his wife had crocheted and who was not inclined to be moved by the fact that the accused claimed to give most of her “finds,” as she termed them, to charitable organizations.
“So her ladyship’s a tough-looking old bird living in a house with four hundred rooms-from the address I peeked at in Mr. Jugg’s appointment book.” Mrs. Malloy’s blonde hair sat on her head like an ill-fitting halo. “Moldy Towers, I think that’s the name of the place.”
“Surely not!”
“I’m not here to argue with you, Mrs. H.” Amazingly, Mrs. Malloy’s nose did not grow with this brazen lie. “The point I’m making is that Lady Krumley wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t in some fearful sort of trouble, now would she?”
“People seek out private detectives for all sorts of reasons. She might suspect the butcher of overcharging her, for all we know.”
“More like her very life’s at stake. Otherwise why not send her man of business or someone of that sort?” She spoke with a long drawn-out hiss. “Her sort aren’t used to doing for themselves. Not unless it’s something they want kept hush-hush. Think on that!”
I didn’t answer.
Mrs. Malloy wagged a finger under my nose. “What if she was to walk out of here without us finding out what’s up, and we was to read in the newspapers tomorrow that she’d been found stuffed in an attic trunk or dead from arsenic in the soup or pushed off one of them bloomin’ towers? Course,” Mrs. Malloy added to fend off any protests on my part, “could be there aren’t no towers, for all you’d think that’s how the place got its name.”
“Really?”
“Too right! I once knew a woman as lived in a house called The Firs. And not so much as a Christmas tree front or back. You know the sort, always putting on airs, some people! But then again you did have to feel sorry for Doris, seeing as how she had a nephew that did her out of the money she’d saved up to buy the washing machine she’d
