Torrant thought rapidly back to the quiet of the street when he approached the house, the time it had taken him to get into the cellar, the altercation with the kitchen door.
He said blandly, “You didn’t quite close the front door behind you,” and watched the blue eyes narrow delicately. “Miss Rowan happened to see someone going into the house and didn’t recognize you. She knew Miss Blair was out, and under the circumstances . . .”
“My,” said Mrs. Kirby carelessly, “the perfect tenant.” Was she frightened under the nonchalance? At any rate she didn’t seem her usual swaggering self. “I should have thought she’d know my car.”
“All cars are gray in the dark,” said Torrant nimbly.
Mrs. Kirby gave him a thoughtful look and began to descend the stairs. She said over her shoulder, “I really must cart away those boxes of mine—this time it was my birth certificate.” They continued down in silence. “To think,” she added with a faint ebullience, “that at my age I should be called upon to produce such a thing.”
And at seven-thirty in the evening too. Having produced a piece of random nonsense, Torrant reflected, she was boldly embroidering it. He took a slanting glance at the enormous leather pouch that swung from a strap over her shoulder; it was a handy size, he thought, for visiting attics with, and from its weighty look her birth certificate might have been written on brick.
They were in the little front hall. He reached for the knob, and he and Mrs. Kirby emerged sedately through Annabelle Blair’s door. Shadows blew across the tiny frozen lawn; after the tight secret silence of the house behind them the night seemed enormous and windblown. Maria Rowan’s was the only other lighted window looking out of the dark.
Mrs. Kirby shivered elaborately and walked down the bank to her car. She said over her shoulder, “Sorry about the false alarm,” and although Torrant couldn’t see her face her voice sounded amused and a little malicious. When she had found her keys and was settled behind the wheel, he closed the door and bent to glance in. “I hear you had a visitor last night.”
There was barely light enough to show him the quick turn of her head, the suspended motion of her hand at the ignition. “Mr. Simeon dropped in and stayed for a cocktail, if that’s what you mean. He left at about seven-thirty. Is that,” inquired Mrs. Kirby, faintly edged, “of great moment, Mr. Torrant?”
“Just asking,” Torrant said equably.
“Should I be flattered? Somehow I don’t think so,” Mrs. Kirby said with a sharp laugh. She switched on the headlights and her bold curving face sprang out of the dark, traced glossily with gold. “Next question?”
She wasn’t really expecting one; she had started the motor and was shifting into gear. Torrant shook his head and took his leaning arm away from the rolled-down window. “Not unless there was something you wanted to see me about, yesterday afternoon at Mrs. Judd’s?”
“Oh, that said Mrs. Kirby dismissingly. “I found out after you’d left that that list of mine was hopelessly antique. You seemed anxious to get in touch with Mrs. Partridge, and as I was driving by anyway I thought I’d ask if you had. But as things turned out you didn’t get to talk to her after all.”
“Only over the telephone.”
‘ Oh?” said Mrs. Kirby alertly. “Was she any help at all about—whatever it was?”
She knew, Torrant realized with a small shock; she had known all along what he wanted with Mrs. Partridge.
“In a way,” he said.
He learned five minutes later that Maria Rowan’s phone had been busy when Paulette Kirby drove up to the Mallow house. They had both forgotten, in arranging to have her call Annabelle Blair’s number by way of a warning signal, that the garage apartment had a two-party line and that on the other line dwelt a feminine voice which answered, and frequently, to the name of Violet.
“Violets a pretty popular girl,” said Maria. She still looked remote. “So I couldn’t call when Mrs. Kirby arrived—and then, after all that, you went and let her in yourself.”
It took a few minutes to straighten that out. Torrant listened, intrigued at the pantomime Mrs. Kirby had presented: her hand at the knocker, her wait for the knock to be answered, the door opening to let her in—under the pressure of her own key, but to a watcher there would appear to be someone behind it. And Maria Rowan might have been out, or busy and unaware, when Annabelle had left with Simeon, so that Mrs. Kirby’s secret visit to an empty house would pass as a call on her friend.
It was impossible to doubt Annabelle’s cold fury if she were to find out that someone else possessed a key to the house where she lived in such careful privacy. But Paulette Kirby had risked that for something in the attic . . .
Torrant remembered all at once something he hadn’t fully noticed at the time. The drawers of Louise Mallow’s bureau had been almost empty, and nowhere upstairs had he seen anything larger than the alligator overnight case. There were certainly trunks in the attic, then, and possibly other things belonging to the Mallows.
Abstractedly, because he was preoccupied with that, Torrant invited Maria to join him for a drink and dinner. He was surprised at the clarity of disappointment when she shook her head, saying that she was too tired; she would have a sandwich and go early to bed. Even then he felt reluctant to leave this comfortable haphazard room suspended in the icy night— and that, he informed himself dryly, was because it was warm inside and cold outside, and his overcoat was still stuffed behind barberry bushes at Annabelle Blair’s
