Torrant reached the door and opened it. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d start asking myself that. But don’t do anything— drastic, Annabelle.”
The faint humorless smile touched her lips again. “Don’t worry, Mr. Torrant,’ said Annabelle Blair. “I won’t.”
How long before she would show her hand?
Torrant drove back between the bleak gray fields, wondering about that. His fury had spent itself, and for the moment he was able to look at Annabelle as an abstract problem that had to be resolved. She would hardly want to leave Chauncy until Gerald Mallow’s will had been probated, and when she did leave she would certainly want to sever herself completely and for good.
Which left her—a week? Two weeks? Torrant’s legal knowledge was sparse, but the Mallows had died only five weeks ago and wills moved through weighty channels. In any case, the interval would be different for her now. He had used the Mallows as a deliberate goad, and the goad had found its mark; Annabelle Blair, looking for suspicion in the town, would find it everywhere.
It was what she had done to Martin—planted the He and left it to grow until it destroyed him. Martin had been vulnerable, and at last, for all her assumed composure, Annabelle Blair was vulnerable, too.
The gray afternoon was losing its clarity, the lilacs in Mrs. Judd’s back yard moved a little in the beginning of a wind. Torrant let himself into the house and stood in the hall, listening to the silence. After a moment he walked to the door at the back and opened it. “Mrs. Judd?”
Mrs. Judd wasn’t in the big old-fashioned kitchen or the back parlor that led out of it. Torrant walked thoughtfully back to the hall, put his hand out for the telephone, and crossed to the table under the mirror instead. There was a folded slip of paper under the bowl of artificial flowers; the outside said in Mrs. Judd’s writing, “Mr. Simeon.”
Torrant opened it without compunction, but the two brief lines inside were not enlightening. “Mrs. Kirby called twice and would like you to call her.”
Mrs. Kirby, professional runner with the hare and hunter with the hounds . . . The front door opened without warning; Torrant had barely time to drop the note into a pocket before Simeon entered the hall. He said blandly, nodding back at the telephone as though he had just left it, “Mrs. Judd seems to be out . . . Mrs. Kirby would like you to call her back.”
“Oh?” Simeon’s brows went up. “Perhaps Annabelle’s decided to sell after all. Incidentally, Mr. Torrant, while were here I wonder if you’d mind a purely curious question. Why all the interest in Mrs. Mallow’s glasses this morning?”
“Not at all,” Torrant said, “Someone else was interested enough to break into the garage to get them, after Miss Rowan had found and dropped them.”
“The garage,” Simeon repeated, and gave Torrant a long bright stare. “The car, and the glasses . . . yes, I see. But Annabelle has a key to the garage.”
Torrant didn’t bother replying that the locks had been changed; he had a feeling that the other man knew it and was probing. It was hard to tell, because the beaky exaggerated face and the wise parrot eyes were a mask in themselves: Simeon had been born in disguise. He reached for a cigarette, careful not to disinter Mrs. Judd’s message, and met the speculative gaze again.
“For reasons I’d rather not go into just now,” Simeon said slowly, “I haven’t been quite candid with you about my coming to Chauncy, Mr, Torrant. To be frank, I was astonished when Annabelle sent for me, I respect her—she’s more than a competent secretary, she’s an extremely intelligent woman—but I fully expected to find proof that she had had a hand in the car crash, and wanted a prop, a kind of character witness.”
Distantly, a car went by. Torrant was grimly determined not to be spellbound by the fluid and oddly convincing voice. He lit his last remaining cigarette, crumpled the empty package and concentrated on tossing it into Mrs. Judd’s claw-footed umbrella stand.
“But,” said Simeon, his glance for a second naked and baffled, “she didn’t do it, Mr. Torrant. In spite of all the circumstances, the accident that killed the Mallows was—exactly that.”
“This is all very disenchanting,” Torrant said briskly. “I had an idea that your relations with Annabelle were much too close to allow a suspicion of murder.”
Simeon smiled. “I won’t deny that I saw a good deal of her at one time—while she was Mrs. Fennister, if you like. Under the circumstances I was hardly infatuated with her purity of spirit.”
Was he admitting the manner of Martin’s death, or merely the fact of Annabelle as an unfaithful wife? Torrant was abruptly tired of riddles. He walked up the stairs, and then paused at the first floor landing as the voice below him in the hall asked for a telephone number.
Simeon said, “Mrs. Kirby? I understand you called.” There was a pause, and then, “Not at all, it happens to—” and another pause. “Oh, ten minutes, fifteen at the outside . . . Of course.”
Torrant covered the last two flights rapidly; he was at the window of his room, gazing down into the bleak side street, when Simeon reached the third floor. The door across the landing opened and then closed, and in spite of what had sounded like an imminent departure, remained that way.
Torrant stayed restlessly close to the window. He didn’t like the darkening north or the quickening wind, or the fact that none of the fore-shortened dark-coated women hurrying along under leafless trees was Mrs. Judd. At a quarter after four he drove into the town for cigarettes and, in the glassed-in privacy of the booth at the back of the drug store, made a telephone call to Maria Rowan.
Maria put down the receiver with relief and a certain care, as though a brisker sound might wake the
