It was gone at once. She put out a hand and opened the car door composedly; she said, “Probably not much more than you saw from across the field. This will do nicely—thanks very much.”
Torrant drove back to Mrs. Judd’s house, wondering.
Mrs. Judd herself was in the lower hall, arranging artificial flowers with real agitation. Mrs. Petrie, the proprietress of the newspaper store, had just telephoned to inquire about the new lodger, and although Mrs. Petrie looked outwardly as good-natured as a balloon, she was full of a genial malice. The purport of her call, under its guise of interest and friendly advice, had been to remind Mrs. Judd of a much more famous Lodger.
So that when Torrant entered the hall, Mrs. Judd eyed him nervously in the mirror over the bowl of flowers. The mirror was old and greenish, and it gave his pleasant face a cold preoccupied look. He caught her gaze in it and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Judd. It’s snowing.”
Mrs. Judd repeated that comfortably to herself as he started for the shadowed stairs: Good morning, Mrs. Judd. It’s snowing. Nothing sinister there, certainly. Nothing . . . Lodgerish. She pulled out a paper daffodil, consideringly, and Torrant had turned back.
“Miss Blair has a tenant, it seems.”
His voice was inquiring, and Mrs. Judd found herself replying unwillingly. “Yes, I heard about her. She’s Mrs. Mallow’s cousin.”
“Mrs. . . . Mallow’s . . . cousin,” repeated Torrant gently. He seemed to have forgotten about the stairs; he simply stood there, staring speculatively at Mrs. Judd, who twisted the daffodil uncertainly. He said, half to her and half to nobody, “It stands to reason,” and turned away and was on the third step before Mrs. Judd remembered the other event of this dark snowy morning. She said, “Mr. Torrant,” and he paused.
“There’s another gentleman on the third floor—he came in shortly after you left and I gave him the other corner room, across from yours. I thought I’d mention it because you’ll probably be running into him now and then. He’s a Mr. . . . Simon?” inquired Mrs. Judd of herself. “Simeon, that’s it—Mr. Simeon.”
The hall wasn’t shaped for echoes, but she thought as she spoke that Torrant looked as though he were listening to one. His head went back a little, alertly, when she said ‘Simon’ and in the second before she corrected herself he murmured in a quoting tone, “Something like that.”
“Oh, you’ve met him, then,” said Mrs. Judd, obscurely relieved.
“No,” Torrant said equably, “not yet, Mrs. Judd,” and walked unhurriedly up the stairs, leaving her with the tatters of the daffodil.
CHAPTER 5
MARIA ROWAN WATCHED the Renault out of sight, narrowing her lashes against the soft beat of snow. She thought that after the little blue car swung right Torrant turned his head fleetingly, as though he were looking back at her, but that might have been a trick of the shifting flakes. She crossed the street and walked an extra block to Chauncy’s only restaurant. Moments later, at a small table opposite a row of booths, she lit a cigarette for the shaken feeling inside.
The field glasses. Fools rush in . . . She should have left them severely alone, dangling so invitingly from a hook on the garage wall; failing that, she should have remembered the light-catching quality of lenses close to a window, even on the darkest morning. Torrant had caught the reflection, his gaze had swung up just as she brought him into focus.
Or had Annabelle Blair, standing behind him as he emerged from the door, glanced up and murmured a warning?
The thought of Annabelle noting the field glasses was sharply worrying; it affected Maria like the sudden memory of a cigarette left burning, or a laundry iron plugged in. It stayed with her, a soundless stop watch, while she ordered and ate a chicken sandwich, left the table to call a taxi, went back to finish her coffee.
Annabelle wouldn’t like being watched. And Annabelle was cold and quiet and dangerous.
Maria had originally intended to do some shopping, to pick up the odds and ends that were always left out of a hurried packing, but under the spur of Torrant’s cool query she directed the driver to Vanguard Street. In the taxi moving slowly through a world of dotted-swiss, she felt better, merely because she was on her way back; she could even, thoughtfully, summon an image of Torrant. In his mid-thirties, she guessed; dark-headed, perceptive, with capable eyes in a face that looked experienced but not bored. Not, in any sense, an idle man.
And not a stranger to Annabelle Blair, in the way that counted. Annabelle lived aloof in the old house Gerald Mallow had bought; she would never have admitted a total alien into what she had made a fortress.
The taxi stopped before the garage. Maria paid the driver, got out into a white hush and scooped for her key. Her gloved fingers fumbled and nearly dropped it, and the brief pause in front of the doors made her aware of something she might otherwise not have noticed—the double line of footprints beside her own of just now, their crispness blurred with a light powder of snow. Coming, and going. Losing themselves in the tire-tracked width of the road and reappearing on the opposite bank, where the Mallow house sat old and silent in the falling snow. Maria turned her back on it, looked at the footprints again and used her key.
The garage was dim after the white flare outside, seeming to contain, in its shadows and lingering breath of gasoline and metal and concrete, the wraith of a wrecked convertible. Maria walked through it to the stairway at the back and up to the apartment above. She unlocked the door and stood on the threshold a moment, because rooms returned to suddenly
