But she was much too clever for that.
The coffee pot began to hiss. Maria poured a cup and carried it to the black-painted bookcase beside the armchair. The snow had stopped but the wind was rising; she heard the bow and swish of the fir branches against the dormer window while she got paper and pencil and began to write. “Dear Maria—I don’t know whether you remember me . . .”
That was Louise, oddly tentative, half-beckoning, suddenly afraid of the woman who was her husband’s secretary. Closed up with her in an old country house full of shadows, on a lonely road, disinherited before she died.
Somewhere in that letter, in among the rambling phrases, there had to be a cloaked suspicion, a beginning of fear, a suggestion of the truth that Annabelle Blair had had to destroy at all costs. Maria drank her coffee and lit a cigarette that burned forgotten in the ashtray while she remembered and wrote and stared at the words of a dead woman.
CHAPTER 6
TORRANT MET Simeon by degrees, slowly, invisibly at first, startled at the weight of his own hostility. But Polly Stark had told him that Annabelle Blair—Annabelle Fennister then —had mentioned a man named ‘Simon . . . something like that’ and had left Martin frequently in the evenings to return ‘in a glow.’
People seldom went into murder alone. In the background there was almost always a human goad, witting or unwitting, the flesh and blood behind the police-blotter motive. Torrant, quietly elated at Mrs. Judd’s announcement of Simeon’s presence on the third floor, had barely closed the door of his room behind him when he heard the one across the landing opened, closed and locked.
He had his own door open almost instantly, but the quick heavy tread had carried the other man down out of sight. He sounded big, solidly built but fast-moving. Torrant followed almost to the first floor landing and stopped at the sound of Mrs. Judd’s voice in the hall below. . .
“Mr. Simeon, would you mind moving your car? We aren’t allowed to park on this street and I wouldn’t want—”
“Of course, Mrs. Judd. I’m on my way out now. I’ll put it behind the house when I come back, shall I?” Deep voice, smooth and peculiarly sweet—commonly used, Torrant thought dispassionately, for charming birds out of trees. Wavy dark hair would suit it nicely.
“‘One more thing,” Mrs. Judd was saying. “I forgot to ask you to sign the book when you came in.”
Five minutes later, when the hall was deserted, Torrant opened the account book which Mrs. Judd used as a register and looked curiously at the latest entry. There were no initials, just the single huge scrawled “Simeon” and an illegible street address in Florida.
Almost generic, that flourishing signature by the man who had all but certainly stood in the wings while Martin Fennister was driven to death. Torrant stared at it a moment longer and turned and went out into the snow.
He had a late lunch. He drove out along Vanguard Street and was surprised to find that Simeon’s old gray convertible was not parked outside the Mallow house. He glanced up at the window over the garage as he passed, half expecting a watchful glimpse of Maria Rowan, but the glass was blank.
The yellow pages of the phone book in the drug store took him on two abortive trips to the edges of the town, so that it was nearly four o’clock when he walked up the miniature lawn of a small house at the end of the main street. The sign swinging from a black iron post said “Jonas Kirby, Real Estate.”
But it was a woman who answered his ring. Her head came out first, wearing curlers under a turban; Torrant got a rapid impression of bold blue eyes and a small bright mouth in a face that seemed all curves and arches. Her skin was tanned and faintly glossy, as though unable to contain the vitality inside. It looked as though there might be a good deal of her, equally glossy, behind the door, and Torrant began a strategic retreat.
She stopped him at once, saying imperturbably, “It’s all right, I’m decent. It’s just that I have a cocktail date. I’m Paulette Kirby, if you are inquiring about a house, and I may be able to help you anyway. Do come in, if you won’t mind the confusion.”
Torrant entered, following her into a small and vividly modem living room. She was a tall woman, wearing her plumpness with an air; the pink and black stripes of her housecoat curved startlingly. She might, from her look of bursting vitality, the swelling stripes, the obviously manless room around her, have devoured Mr. Kirby within the hour. She was, Torrant thought, about forty-five.
He introduced himself and was invited to sit down on a white chair shaped like a palette, while Mrs. Kirby perched on the iron arm of another and regarded him with her eyebrows up. In spite of the metal curlers the turban didn’t conceal, she had an air of rakish magnificence—the lady of the manor working for a living and doing it with gusto. He wondered what it was about her likable urbanity that he didn’t quite trust.
He said that he had driven by the Mallow house several times and was interested in it on behalf of friends; had Mrs. Kirby any idea whether it might be for sale?
“Dear me, I hope not,” said Mrs. Kirby with a short ebullient laugh. “I knew the original people quite well and I still have some old trunks stored in that attic. The present owner, a Miss Blair, has been a lamb and let me keep them there.” Torrant said mildly, “It seems like a big place for a woman living alone.”
“It is, with servants what they are. But Miss Blair inherited the house
