“Of course, so they were. Well, that accounts for that. The mousetrap and the two frying pans, they was all to go with the bath, and that’s all except the soap, which you’ve got, Gertie. No, thank you very much, all the same, but it isn’t ours; somebody else must have dropped it.”
The old gentleman repudiated it firmly but politely, and the two girls merely giggled at it. Miss Climpson passed on. Two young women with their attendant young men duly thanked her in the second room, but said the parcel was not theirs.
Miss Climpson passed into the third room. In one corner was a rather talkative party of people with an Airedale, and at the back, in the most obscure and retired of all the Oriental nooks and corners, sat the nurse, reading a book.
The talkative party had nothing to say to the parcel, and Miss Climpson, with her heart beating fast, bore down upon the nurse.
“Excuse me,” she said, smiling graciously, “but I think this little parcel must be yours. I picked it up just in the doorway and I’ve asked all the other people in the café.”
The nurse looked up. She was a grey haired, elderly woman, with those curious large blue eyes which disconcert the beholder by their intense gaze, and are usually an index of some emotional instability. She smiled at Miss Climpson and said pleasantly:
“No, no, it isn’t mine. So kind of you. But I have all my parcels here.”
She vaguely indicated the cushioned seat which ran round three sides of the alcove, and Miss Climpson, accepting the gesture as an invitation, promptly sat down.
“How very odd,” said Miss Climpson, “I made sure someone must have dropped it coming in here. I wonder what I had better do with it.” She pinched it gently. “I shouldn’t think it was valuable, but one never knows. I suppose I ought to take it to the police station.”
“You could hand it to the cashier,” suggested the nurse, “in case the owner came back here to claim it.”
“Well now, so I could,” cried Miss Climpson. “How clever of you to think of it. Of course, yes, that would be the best way. You must think me very foolish, but the idea never occurred to me. I’m not a very practical person, I’m afraid, but I do so admire the people who are. I should never do to take up your profession, should I? Any little emergency leaves me quite bewildered.”
The nurse smiled again.
“It is largely a question of training,” she said. “And of self-training, too, of course. All these little weaknesses can be cured by placing the mind under a Higher Control—don’t you believe that?”
Her eyes rested hypnotically upon Miss Climpson’s.
“I suppose that is true.”
“It is such a mistake,” pursued the nurse, closing her book and laying it down on the table, “to imagine that anything in the mental sphere is large or small. Our least thoughts and actions are equally directed by the higher centres of spiritual power, if we can bring ourselves to believe it.”
A waitress arrived to take Miss Climpson’s order.
“Oh, dear! I seem to have intruded myself upon your table …”
“Oh, don’t get up,” said the nurse.
“Are you sure? Really? because I don’t want to interrupt you—”
“Not at all. I live a very solitary life, and I am always glad to find a friend to talk to.”
“How nice of you. I’ll have scones and butter, please, and a pot of tea. This is such a nice little café, don’t you think?—so quiet and peaceful. If only those people wouldn’t make such a noise with that dog of theirs. I don’t like those great big animals, and I think they’re quite dangerous, don’t you?”
The reply was lost on Miss Climpson, for she had suddenly seen the title of the book on the table, and the Devil, or a Ministering Angel (she was not quite sure which) was, so to speak, handing her a fullblown temptation on a silver salver. The book was published by the Spiritualist Press and was called “Can the Dead Speak?”
In a single moment of illumination, Miss Climpson saw her plan complete and perfect in every detail. It involved a course of deception from which her conscience shrank appalled, but it was certain. She wrestled with the demon. Even in a righteous cause, could anything so wicked be justified?
She breathed what she thought was a prayer for guidance, but the only answer was a small whisper in her ear, “Oh, jolly good work, Miss Climpson!” and the voice was the voice of Peter Wimsey.
“Pardon me,” said Miss Climpson, “but I see you are a student of spiritualism. How interesting that is!”
If there was one subject in the world about which Miss Climpson might claim to know something, it was Spiritualism. It is a flower which flourishes bravely in a boardinghouse atmosphere. Time and again, Miss Climpson had listened while the apparatus of planes and controls, correspondences and veridical communications, astral bodies, auras and ectoplastic materialisations was displayed before her protesting intelligence. That to the Church it was a forbidden subject she knew well enough, but she had been paid companion to so many old ladies and had been forced so many times to bow down in the House of Rimmon.
And then there had been the quaint little man from the Psychical Research Society. He had stayed a fortnight in the same private hotel with her at Bournemouth. He was skilled in the investigation of haunted houses and the detection of poltergeists. He had rather liked Miss Climpson, and she had passed several interesting evenings hearing about the tricks of mediums. Under his guidance she had learnt to turn tables and produce explosive cracking noises; she knew how to examine a pair of sealed slates for the marks of the wedges which let the chalk go in on a long black wire to write spirit passages. She had seen the ingenious rubber gloves which
