She was, Torrant thought, her own best alibi; she was clearly and magnificently in the throes of a morning-after. She wore a tailored navy blue robe that she swished impatiently about her tall and heavily handsome figure, and her bold good-natured face looked yellow instead of tanned inside its glitter of cold cream. Everything about her—small cherry mouth, nervous laughter, exaggerated gestures of red-nailed hands—had the faintly wild, unstrung look of hangover. Except her eyes, Torrant amended to himself; in the midst of all this harried amusement her eyes stayed cold and very shrewd.
He said, “Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Kirby. What I wanted—” and she stopped him with raised hands and an arching of plucked brows over closed eyelids. “My dear man, I owe myself a cold beer. May I owe you one too?”
“Done,” said Torrant, and followed her into a small blue and white kitchen that opened off the hall beyond the living room. On the table in the tiny breakfast nook was a cup of coffee which Mrs. Kirby had evidently had a valorous try at. It had a spurned look, and she gave it a glance of distaste, saying over her shoulder, “One does what one can without a maid, although I must confess that there are times . . . Income tax, the great leveller,” she ended wryly.
Torrant’s first reaction was that she was still very slightly drunk, his second that she was not; that she had once had money and maids and revelled in them and was now busy creating the impression that she didn’t give a damn. He wondered idly what had happened to her husband; Mrs. Kirby looked like one of those women to whose husbands something weird and terrible inevitably happened.
She was a strange playmate for Annabelle Blair—or, all things considered, was she? She opened the beer debonairly; her very back looked vital and amused. Torrant said, pouring his, “Speaking of maids, did the Mallows inquire about one when they bought the house?”
He sat tense under Mrs. Kirby’s surprised and concentrated stare. When she didn’t answer at once he said gently, “It’s a big house. And with Miss Blair along in a secretarial capacity, no matter what developed in that line later . . . Mrs. Mallow doesn’t sound like a woman used to doing her own housework.”
Simeon’s sardonic comment on the cleaning of the hotel rug on the night Gerald Mallow was stricken, the neatly stacked newspapers and kindling and logs in the Dutch oven in that shadowy old house . . . it was a contradiction of character that had been bothering him all along. Mrs. Kirby narrowed her eyes and said abstractedly, “It wasn’t a maid, it was a cleaning-woman.”
“But they did get one?”
“Yes, for a week or two. Let me see . . . There’s no employment agency around here, you know, so it’s just a matter of jotting down the names of available women as we get them, in case clients are interested. Hold on and I’ll get my list.”
She hadn’t, Torrant noticed, asked him why he cared; was she bemused and automatic, or did she know without being told? She was back almost at once, wearing a pair of shell-rimmed glasses that gave her a startlingly severe air, flipping the pages of a loose-leaf notebook.
“It’s here somewhere, I remember making a note . . . Yes. Mrs. Sarah Partridge, Locust Street. But,” said Mrs. Kirby thoughtfully, “she didn’t stay. I thought Mrs. Mallow would have a fit over the phone, and I don’t suppose Annabelle liked it much either, being next in line for the job, but Mrs. Partridge left anyway.”
Torrant thought that she said it with a faint admiration. No one knew a house and its inhabitants better than a cleaning-woman; no one else had such unparalleled opportunities for hearing scraps of conversation, noting habits and attitudes, gauging the temper of a place . . . He said baldly, “Didn’t Mrs. Partridge like it there?”
“Cleaning-women don’t like it anywhere,” said Mrs. Kirby practically, “though I must say I wouldn’t have worked for Mrs. Mallow for a minute. But it wasn’t that with Mrs. Partridge. A sister of hers lost her husband, I think—something like that—and she went down to Connecticut or somewhere to help out.”
“You wouldn’t have the name?”
“My dear man,” said Mrs. Kirby soberly, “at the moment I barely have a pulse.”
“But Mrs. Partridge must have had other relatives here.”
“Oh, I daresay,” said Mrs. Kirby, and sighed loudly and pushed the shell glasses to the end of her nose while she peered. “Recommended by . . . here we are, Mrs. Joseph Watts, something Templeton Road. Another sister, I think.”
“Thanks,” said Torrant, standing, “you’ve been very helpful,” and carried away with him the memory of a shrewd and suddenly dubious gaze.
Mrs. Watts, a mournful candle-colored woman in her fifties, was reluctant to part with her sister’s address in Connecticut; it took Torrant half an hour to undo her fixed impression that he was a tax man. He got the address at last and with relief, because Sarah Partridge was all at once very interesting indeed.
Had Gerald Mallow been afraid of his wife—or of his secretary? The changing of his will could have been a sop in the face of a threat, a temporary gesture made unexpectedly permanent by his death. Mrs. Partridge wouldn’t have answers, but she would certainly have impressions—and she appeared to be the only person in a position to have studied the Mallow household at close range.
If she were anything like the wary Mrs. Watts, he wouldn’t be able to get what he wanted over the phone. Torrant frowned intently over that all the way back into the center of town. He was still
