A muscle in the thick white throat began to flicker; he watched it, fascinated and repelled. “What sharp eyes you have, Mr. Torrant,” said Annabelle Blair with the first open venom he had heard her use. “As a matter of fact, I was sorting out some things for storage. There’s been a lot of that to do.”
The clean-up spot. She had been in it twice: tidy up after Martin, straighten out the Mallow affairs—and then, in both cases, after she had established herself as quiet and harmless, flight. Mrs. Partridge had thrown her badly off schedule, as witness the hastily hidden suitcase, the uncontrollable twitching.
“That’s right, of course,” said Torrant pleasantly. “You’ve had more than your share of that lately, haven’t you, Miss Blair?”
Annabelle shrugged. She had herself under iron control again, moving into the room, straightening a fold of curtain as though her mind were already elsewhere. The gesture was small; it contrived to appear mocking. “Perhaps. I am rather busy at the moment, Mr. Torrant, so if you’ll excuse me . . .”
Torrant left. He passed her at the window as he let himself out, and the faint tiny pearling of dampness along her hairline reminded him unpleasantly of advertisements for synthetics which were porous, and breathed.
Twenty minutes later, head tilted consideringly, Maria Rowan said, “You can’t be sure, can you, that it wasn’t accident?” She had lost her cool untouchable look; she was pale and intent, her eyes imploring. “People do—fall into ponds.”
“Children,” said Torrant brusquely. “Drunks. Kids on bets.
Very seldom middle-aged women who know every step of the way.” He glanced across at her. “It’s possible, of course. The telephone message in Mrs. Judd’s hall might have blown away in a draught. Or been carried away by a pack rat with nothing to read. Mrs. Partridge might have been going to tell me that all was bliss between the Mallows and Annabelle Blair the soul of honor, she may have gone teetering along the edge of the pond just for the hell of it.”
He stopped, and said flatly, “But I don’t believe it. It wasn’t an accident. I ought to know—I set the whole thing up.”
“That’s nonsense—” Maria began and broke off, not looking at him, because there was really nothing to substantiate that. She poured coffee instead into the waiting cups in the kitchenette. Torrant said quietly, “The train got in at 6:35. Did Annabelle Blair go out after I left you?”
“You left at a little before six—and then I was dressing.”
Something oblique about that, something sharply at variance with the character of a girl who stood at the window with field glasses, had her locks changed, found out where Annabelle Blair went on her walks. Was she beginning to wonder about the cousin she had never known? Was she afraid of what Annabelle, cornered, might have to say about Louise Mallow?
Torrant felt the new, already-familiar anger stirring in him again. Mrs. Partridge was only a name to Maria Rowan, comfortably remote, divorced from even so frail a reality as a voice heard over a telephone wire. She was not a dead weight on Maria’s conscience—but she was dead. He looked at the silky dark head, the clear profile that made its own decisions, and found himself telling Maria about Martin Fennister.
It was the first time he had spoken aloud about Martin, and he kept it dry and factual. Brief though he was, the subtle horror came through, the discerning intelligence that could don a Hallowe’en mask and send a fanciful child tumbling over a rooftop. Because in that one sense Martin had had a child’s vulnerability, with a child’s trust in the people close to him.
There was a silence when his voice stopped. Maria looked chilled through. It crossed Torrant’s mind irrelevantly that she had the kind of face that Martin, bored with luscious and lacquered beauty, would have liked to photograph.
And whatever indecision had been in it was gone. Maria said flatly, “Yes, she did go out last night, at a little after six.” There was no need for a name between them. “She was at the telephone twice, I could see her against the shade. I suppose the second time was to call the taxi.”
And the first? But the taxi—open, brisk, a matter of record; Torrant’s grim elation flattened a little. Then Maria said in a suddenly doubtful voice, “She was going to the library, or at least it looked as though she was,” and Annabelle Blair’s expedition took on a subtly different air.
CHAPTER 12
ANNABELLE HAD waited outside for the taxi, standing in the brilliance of the overhead light for between five and ten minutes. She hadn’t paced about or glanced at her watch or shown any other signs of impatience; according to Maria she had simply stood there, although the night had been piercingly cold, and waited.
For Torrant the light struck a note of insistence, as though she had deliberately called attention to herself. Why—unless to establish the impression that she had been at the library when Mrs. Partridge went into the pond? Her whereabouts wasn’t apt to be called into question, and if it should be, eventually, the librarian’s memory as to a specific evening would have had ample time to dim.
It was a small point, but it was in sharp contrast to Annabelle’s passion for unobtrusiveness. Torrant thought that over; he said to Maria, “I got here last night at a few minutes after seven. Had she come back by then, or did you notice?”
She shook her head. “I was dressing. But if she did come back she walked, because none of the cars that went by stopped. I’d have heard—” She was standing with her back to the sink; she turned suddenly, proving her point, and Torrant joined her at the window.
Simeon’s gray convertible was pulling to a stop behind the Renault. Simeon got
