Not unaware of it, and having missed Mr. Shearsby by design, he put on what his wife called his party manners.
“I think you will do very well. It is only a small matter, Mrs. Shearsby. About your husband’s cousin Raymond.”
The pince-nez flashed in their baffling way. “ Raymond ?” Lilian Shearsby repeated.
“About some of his belongings, to be exact. I believe your husband took charge of his papers.”
“He has given them to the police, Mr. Tuke.”
“Only letters and so on, I’m told. I am interested in his literary remains, which are not the sort the police concern themselves with.”
“Oh, there’s still a pile of junk upstairs, if that’s what you mean,” Mrs. Shearsby said. “Typewritten stories, and scribblings, and old magazines. I tried to read the magazines. I’m a great reader. Give me a good book, and you can’t tear me away. Quite the bookworm, Mr. Shearsby calls me. But most of these mags are too dull for words. There’s a thing called The Ludgate . . .” She giggled again. “Well, I mean, I like romances and love stories, something to take you out of yourself, not queer tales like Raymond’s, or articles about dead and gone writers and old buildings and such. I haven’t properly looked at the typewritten stuff.”
“Perhaps you will let me have it?”
“I shall be glad to get rid of it. It only collects dust. I’ve been thinking of burning the lot.”
“If there happen to be unpublished stories, they are somebody’s property,” Mr. Tuke pointed out.
But she merely looked puzzled, and saying she would fetch the things, she left the room. Left to his own devices, Harvey examined it more closely. Upon mass-produced furniture the revealing features of long occupation were super-imposed. There were many photographs on the mantelpiece and the occasional tables. A few of cabinet size in silver frames were of opulent-looking ladies in furs or tweeds—the sort of ladies who open bazaars and hold showy positions in charitable organisations. In one, signed dashingly, ‘Yours, Maud Winterbourne’, Mr. Tuke recognised the features of a Viscountess who paid freely in this coin for services rendered. But most of the photographs showed the chemist and his wife, the former drooping and looking down his nose, the latter, surprisingly, quite often in an athletic role. Equipped for tennis and badminton, she revealed a good figure and a well developed forearm. It appeared that she also played golf, and in a group of people in costume she was discovered in knee-breeches and a three-cornered hat, and wearing a sword. Mr. Tuke’s limited acquaintance with suburban and provincial life had not prepared him for such versatility. The camera offered no evidence that Mortimer Shearsby indulged in similar frivolities, but plenty of his passion for godwottery. He was posed all over his fussy garden, generally in shirtsleeves and grasping fork or hoe, amidst gnomes and frogs and pergolas and things. Mr. Tuke made a diabolical face at his absent host, and turned his attention to a small set of bookshelves. He had it on the chemist’s own authority that the latter had no time for reading, and on his wife’s that she could not be torn away from a good book, and it might therefore be taken that the volumes in her drawing-room represented her personal tastes. Regardless of subject, they were carefully ranked according to size. There were not many novels; no doubt she got her fiction from a lending library; but among the authors in this genre Mr. Tuke noted the names—they were no more than names to him—of Berta Ruck, Denise Robins and Lady Eleanor Smith. Two or three crime stories, one by Austin Freeman and the others by writers familiar, perhaps, to Sir Bruton Karnes but not to his legal assistant, rather oddly leavened an array of titles which suggested the romantic themes the ardent reader admittedly preferred. Those of the far more numerous general works were even more revealing. Most of these appeared to have been bought second-hand. My Life at the Court of St. Petersburg, Intimate Memories of the Hapsburgs, Kings, Queens and Courtiers, Memoirs of a Lady in Waiting, Romances
of the Peerage, Great Love Stories——here was the true stuff of Lilian Shearsby’s dreams. The inyestigator, rising from the stooping posture he had adopted to read these glittering names, stood gazing sardonically at the neatly ordered shelves. He thought of the books in Vivien Ardmore’s very different room. He could imagine Miss Ardmore’s or the dead Raymond’s comments on this literary pabulum. Its devourer was not of course a Shearsby, but her husband obviously had a mind of the same order. The pair were well matched. And yet. . . . Mr. Tuke pondered a moment. After all, were they? He recalled Lilian Shearsby’s remark about wanting something to take her out of herself. Why should she feel this need? Did life with the egotistical and close-fisted Mortimer fail to satisfy? Her varied activities again suggested that it did, and it was perhaps significant that there were no photographs of her doing anything in the garden, even picking a flower. Could it be that godwottery made no appeal?
An end was put to these reflections by the return of their subject, carrying a large parcel wrapped in brown paper. On an occasional table, cleared of its knick-knacks, Harvey went through Raymond Shearsby’s literary remains—a sad jumble of typescripts, manuscripts, notebooks, odd scraps of paper, press-cuttings and other trivia, thrown together anyhow, no doubt by Mortimer Shearsby for removal from the cottage at Dry Stocking. There was nothing here that the chemist could sell, and it was a marvel that he had not made a bonfire of the lot in the cottage garden. A quick inspection for the only item in which Harvey was interested produced the typescript and two proofs of Too Many Cousins, and he began to wrap the package up again.
Lilian Shearsby watched him with no more than
