he could see Miriam Sharpe reading between the lines of what he had said. ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous, Inspector,’ she said, horrified. ‘There’s no love lost between Celia and me, as you know, but she’s built a career—a life, if you like —on improving things for women. Cold-bloodedly pushing a child down the stairs simply isn’t something she’d be capable of.’
‘I gather she’s shown an avid interest in Lucy’s condition since the accident.’
‘Well yes, she has, but that’s only natural. She’s as worried about the organisation’s reputation as I am, and her own position may well be in question if Lucy dies—the girl should never have been doing what she was doing in the first place.’
‘I think she has rather more at stake than her position, Miss Sharpe.’
‘But why on earth would she want to harm a servant?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that at the moment,’ he said, and marvelled at how this simple expression of honesty invariably conveyed a greater significance to the listener. Miriam Sharpe was no exception.
‘Very well, Inspector,’ she said. ‘I suppose I have no choice but to trust you, but please explain to me what you intend to do. I’ll agree to nothing which goes against the interests of my patient.’
‘Of course,’ Penrose said, and outlined his plan with as much reassurance as he could. ‘When the policeman leaves the door outside Miss Peters’s room, I want the nurse on duty to leave, too, and wait in one of the other rooms down the corridor.’
‘You think the girl is in danger so you leave her entirely unprotected?’
‘Not unprotected at all. As soon as the nurse leaves, one of my officers will wait behind the screen in …’
‘Yes, yes, Inspector—we’ve all read
‘You have my word. There will no additional risk to her life. I don’t make sacrifices, Miss Sharpe, particularly the human sort, and I don’t take it upon myself to decide the value of a life any more than you do in your work.’
His self-righteousness won him the day. She nodded reluctantly, but said: ‘I must stress, Inspector, that if anything goes wrong I will personally do everything I can to ensure you never have the opportunity of making another mistake.’
If anything went wrong, Penrose thought, she would have to get in the queue, but he thanked her and stood up to leave. ‘And I can rely on you not to share this information with anyone?’
‘Yes. I’ll take care of Lucy myself tonight. I have no desire to be at the circus, but my nurses will be only too glad to go. In any case,’ she added as he got to the door, ‘this is hardly something that I’d wish to broadcast, is it?’
Lettice and Ronnie were taking a break in the bar when he got downstairs, and he was pleased to find them on their own. ‘Coffee?’ Lettice asked, pushing the pot towards him across the table.
He shook his head. ‘Sorry—I haven’t got time. I was hoping to have a word with Wyles if you can get her for me?’
‘I’m not sure we can spare her,’ Ronnie said, and grinned. ‘Seriously, Archie—she’s been an absolute gem, and she’s really taken Hilda’s mind off what’s happened. If you ever decide against women in the force, you know where to send her.’
‘You’ll be lucky,’ he said. ‘I need all the help I can get, especially today. As do you, it seems—you both look exhausted.’
‘It’s the coffee that’s keeping us conscious,’ Lettice admitted. ‘We’ve been here all night. It’s the only way we stand any chance at all of being ready by this evening.’
‘Then you can’t tell me how Josephine is,’ Archie said. ‘I was hoping you might have seen her at breakfast.’
‘Josephine?’ Ronnie asked, confused.
‘Yes. I sent her back to Maiden Lane last night—there’s too much going on here at the moment, and I’d rather she was safely out of the way. And you should be careful, too, if you insist on wandering round the building in the dead of night.’
‘But I popped back to Maiden Lane at around two to fetch something to eat and Josephine …’
‘And Josephine was asleep by then,’ Lettice interrupted, glaring at her sister. ‘But she’s fine, Archie—we saw her this morning when she came to try her dress on. It was sweet of you to be worried, though. I’m sure she appreciated it.’ Ronnie looked at her, bewildered, but said nothing more. ‘We’ll go back to the girls now and find an excuse to send Lillian out to you. Will you be here?’
Archie looked round, and changed his mind about the coffee. ‘Yes, this is private enough and I won’t keep her long. And if you see Josephine again, tell her I’ll be here at six-thirty.’
‘All right. See you later.’
‘What the fuck was that about?’ Ronnie asked peevishly as they made their way out into the foyer.
Marta sat by the window for a long time after Josephine left, half afraid to go anywhere else in the house. It was a neat trick, this conjuring of loneliness from solitude, restlessness from peace, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on how Josephine had managed it in just a few hours, but all her carefully constructed self-sufficiency had disappeared in a taxi to Cavendish Square, and what she was left with now felt empty and desolate.
Tired of the silence, she walked over to the gramophone to put some music on, then changed her mind and made some coffee instead. Her head ached from too much wine and too little sleep, and she turned the bathroom cabinet inside out looking for the aspirin before remembering that she’d left the bottle on the terrace the day before, when her back had lost the war against the ceanothus. Throwing a coat on over her pyjamas, she went out to fetch them. The garden looked worse than ever this morning: it had that weary, dirty feel that always follows snow, and her efforts to clear the borders had only succeeded in trampling mud into the grass and creating piles of dead wood and rubble wherever she looked. As she stared out over a barren, bleak stretch of earth, a wasteland with no hope of spring, she wondered why she had ever imagined that there was a point to all this.
She picked the bottle of pills up and put it down again, afraid of how comforting it felt in her hand. By now, she had lost count of how many times this particular routine had played itself out in her life, but she was surely running out of excuses. She turned to go back inside, the tablets once again in her pocket, but something caught her eye by the wall—a flash of brilliant yellow which hadn’t been there yesterday. Bending down, she looked in delight at the winter daffodil, and smiled to think that it should have chosen today to arrive.
Before she could change her mind, Marta walked back to the house, wrestling with the lid of the bottle as she went. She swallowed two aspirin with a mouthful of cold coffee, then took a card out of the wastepaper basket and went over to the telephone.
Josephine stared at her reflection in the looking glass on the back of the door, and decided that it wasn’t going to get any better. There was no question that Ronnie and Lettice had excelled themselves on her behalf: the dress was modelled on a design by Lucien Lelong which she had casually admired when last at their studios, never suspecting that they would recreate it for her. Cut low at the back, and made of a soft satin which clung to the waist and hips and draped in sinuous folds from the thigh, the gown was predominantly black except for a twisted column of scarlet and emerald ribbons that extended down the spine to the floor. It was stunning, and normally she would have been thrilled, but dressing to be on show was the last thing she wanted to do this evening; she only hoped that she had appeared more gracious than she felt when she tried the dress on earlier.
She fastened a single string of pearls around her neck so that it hung down her back, emphasising the low- cut line of the dress, and left the room while she could still resist the urge to crawl between the sheets and hide. Going down the stairs, she was careful not to tread on one of the club’s more idiosyncratic features—a silver cross, embedded into one of the steps as a memorial to an unfortunate resident of the old house who had died from a fall and was supposed to haunt the first-floor landing. It was all nonsense, of course, but it fascinated some of the members and Celia had always been happy to exploit any legend that brought in more subscriptions—in fact, Josephine had once joked that she probably put it there herself. After the tragic accident at the weekend, though, the remark had ceased to be amusing. She wondered how Lucy was, and remembered how nervous and clumsy she had seemed at their two brief meetings; with the luxury of hindsight, it seemed inevitable that something would happen to the girl sooner or later, but Josephine had never envisaged the horror of the injuries which Celia had described to her.
Archie was waiting at reception, and she smiled nervously at him, wondering how quickly they would be able
