‘I’m fond of the little so-and-so, and if she wants a man, so be it. Well, the next thing, and much the most important, was this pseudo-marriage with that heel Polly Hempseed. After she had come back here and you had gone, I shook the truth out of Ellie – literally, I mean. I threatened to kill her if she didn’t come absolutely clean.’
Dame Beatrice sized up the short, square, sturdy figure and the resolute bull-dog face, and could picture the scene, but she said: ‘Wrestling-match or whatever it was, I would have thought Miss Barnes, with her height and the degree of physical fitness which, I imagine, goes with her secondary profession as a model, would have had the advantage in a trial of bodily strength.’
‘Not when I’m hopping mad, which I was,’ said Billie. ‘Besides, Ellie has the usual feminine dislike of going to the mat and settling matters by seeing which can bite pieces out of whom. I think, too, that she was scared stiff of the Satan lot. Anyway, she gave in easily and came clean.’
‘How clean, I wonder?’
‘Oh, I’m sure I heard it all. I said I should go to the police. She broke down completely and begged me not to involve her. That brought me up all standing, but I got the address of that junk shop out of her and I went along to put the fear of God into that bloke.’
‘Interesting. Did you threaten
‘No. He wasn’t there, so I pushed a letter through the shop’s letter-box. I couldn’t keep on going there. After all, I have my job to think about. Besides, I guessed they had lost interest in Ellie once she had become – once she had lost – after she and Hempseed – I mean, she was no use as a sacrificial victim any more.’
‘Yes, yes, I quite understand. And now?’
‘Well, that’s about it. Ellie and I still share this house, but, of course, things will never be the same again. I suppose she’ll marry some day. I wish she would, and get to hell out of my life.’
‘How does the death of Miss Minnie fit into all this?’
‘I have no idea, except that, from what I made Ellie tell me, it was Minnie, blast her! – who introduced Ellie to these Satanists.’
(2)
Niobe herself opened the door to Dame Beatrice.
‘Oh, no!’ she said, stepping back a pace when she recognised the visitor.
‘I fear so,’ said Dame Beatrice, stepping inside. ‘I wonder whether Mr Shard is at home? It is he with whom I would speak.’
‘Mandrake? I expect he’s busy.’
‘Perhaps you will be good enough to ring through on the intercommunication apparatus and let him know that I am here.’
‘Will you state your business? He won’t be pleased to have his writing interrupted unless you have business of importance to discuss with him.’
‘My business concerns the death of the man who kept an antique-dealer’s shop in the town and from whom Mrs Gavin brought a yataghan.’
‘A what?’
‘And to whom you either sold or gave a set of steel fire-irons, although you have denied doing so.’
‘You had better come into my office.’ Dame Beatrice followed her and Niobe made contact with Mandrake Shard.
‘Will you go up?’ she said. ‘He is at the end of the landing on the first floor. There is a nameplate on the sitting-room door.’
Shard, who seemed to have been working at an enormous desk which was covered with reference books, papers and a typewriter which had a half-finished sheet of quarto still sticking up in it, greeted her twitteringly.
‘Well, well, well! Hullo, hullo!’ he said. ‘How nice! How very, very nice! Sherry, I think, don’t you? Or shall we go out to tea again? No. Sherry, sherry! Oh, but do come in! Come in!’
Dame Beatrice came in and closed the door. The room, she noted, was beautifully and expensively furnished and, except for the littered desk, exquisitely neat and clean. There was only one picture on the walls, but it was a Picasso of the artist’s 1941 period. Dame Beatrice wondered whether its fantastic disorientations, exaggerations and unkind if humorous comments upon a woman’s features and bodily attitude were a kind of compensation to Shard for his own tiny but well-formed frame and his loss of the girl he had once hoped to marry.
Dame Beatrice took the armchair to which he waved her and he bustled about in the cupboards of a satinwood cabinet and produced glasses and a couple of early nineteenth-century decanters – all of them collectors’ pieces – and cried gaily:
‘Which shall it be? Which shall it be? And do you take a biscuit with your sherry? Speak now, or for ever after hold your peace!’
‘No biscuit. The sherry is at your choice,’ she said. She sat and sipped while she studied the room and Shard, she surmised, studied her. He did not drink.
‘More?’ he enquired. ‘Ah, well, later on, perhaps. One is disposed to enquire, if one does not give offence, why you have come to see me.’
‘I want to know more about the Satanists.’
‘Oh, my dear Mrs Farintosh!’
‘Since last we met, their leader has met his end. By the way, as there should be few secrets between friends, I ought to tell you that Mrs Farintosh, as such, does not exist.’
