The Importance of Being Ernestine Read online

Mrs. Malloy heaved a sigh that shot out her bosom six inches. “I don’t like to push meself forward. Let someone else steal the limelight, that’s always been my way. Besides it wasn’t like I was just sitting around looking like something Cary Grant would have died to hold in his arms for just one minute. I was taking it all in. Every single word as was said.”

  “I’m sure her ladyship would have thought the whole setup very odd if she hadn’t been so intent on convincing us that dark forces were at work beyond the great divide. She failed with me, but don’t let that stop you from being a true believer.”

  “What I believe is we ought to get busy finding Ernestine before Lady Krumley gives herself a ruddy nervous breakdown,” retorted Mrs. Malloy at her most virtuous. “It’s our Christian duty, besides being a chance for me to get a leg up in me new career. And I’ll tell you another thing, Mrs. H., if I did know how to get hold of Milk, I’m not so sure I’d do it. He’s entitled to some time off, holed up with his booze and his memories of the woman he had to send up the river. Wouldn’t it be something if he was to come back all bleary eyed and unshaven- my dream man come true-and I was able to put the spark back in him, just by saying, ‘No need to upset you hangover about the Krumley case. It’s all sorted out. A treat.’?”

  I was silent. There is no reasoning with an infatuated sixty-year-old.

  “Well, I never thought you’d let me down, Mrs. H.” She brushed away an imaginary tear from her false eyelashes. “Not for all your funny little ways, I didn’t. But if it means going it alone so be it! Tomorrow I’ll head out for Moultty Towers on the bus. Going by car would have been more convenient, but it’s not like I don’t know where Biddlington-By-Water is. A proper dead-in-a-live-hole if ever there was one. Went there a few years back, I did, to play bingo at the Old Age Pensioners’ Hall. Wasn’t anyone in the room with their own teeth and most of them too deaf to hear the caller. Talk about a wasted evening. I remember this one geezer in particular that kept saying gambling was sin and he shouldn’t be there and that if his wife, or it could have been his daughter, knew of it it’d break her heart. Never happy unless they’re miserable some people, but that’s neither here nor there to you, is it Mrs. H.?”

  “What exactly do you hope to accomplish by going to Moultty Towers other than another chat with her ladyship?” I was putting on my coat and Mrs. Malloy proceeded to button hers.

  “Talk to people, if there’s any still around, that knew Flossie Jones. Like the kitchen maid. Could be someone will remember something being said… about her family, for instance… that will help me get started.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea and for a weak moment I was tempted to go with her. Tracking down names and addresses, following up the most tenuous of leads would surely be preferable to facing up to Kathleen Ambleforth’s voluble disappointment when I asked for the return of the vanload of items from Ben’s study. Also, and far worse, was the possibility that Ben would remain angry with me. I had never seen him as he had been tonight, so cold and tight-lipped. His bouts of irritation with me tended to be vehement, with him stomping around, clutching his head and shouting an occasional lion’s roar, a brief upset that rustled the curtains and shifted a couple of pictures out of alignment before he threw up his hands and suggested a cup of tea. This was different, and I both longed to be home and dreaded Ben’s response when I came through the door.

  “What’s that?” Mrs. Malloy’s voice bounced me back to the moment at hand.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I know that! I’m not deaf!” It did not bode well that the second person in one evening to feel I had betrayed them was not ready to forgive and forget at a moment’s notice. “I thought I heard something.” She stood pulling on her gloves. “A creaking sound.”

  “I heard one earlier,” I said. “Old buildings tend to make their own funny little noises. Or it could be a stray cat that’s found it’s way in from the alleyway. There was one hanging about when I came in.” The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I heard the indisputable sound of a footstep.

  “Cat! Me Aunt Fanny!” Mrs. M. gave the leopard toque, that matched her fur coat, a twitch. “There’s someone out there. But there’s no need to get your knickers in a twist. It’ll be Lady Krumley come back to tell us something she forgot. Or Milk,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion, “stumbling up the stairs to die at his desk with a cigarette between his lips and his very own bottle of booze in his hand after being shot in the back by some thug he was onto…”

  She didn’t get to paint a vivid word picture of her selflessly nursing Mr. Jugg back to health and vigor. The office door that neither of us had thought to lock after her ladyship’s departure was thrust open and a man stood in the opening. He wore a raincoat and hat as befitted the weather and a pair of sunglasses that didn’t. He also happened to be holding a gun, which he waved around in what seemed to me a random fashion while twitching on his feet like someone with a bad case of chilblains.

  “Well, I must say! The least you could do was knock!” Mrs. Malloy glared at him.

  “Where’s the boss?” he snarled.

  “Left for the evening.” I glanced toward the desk hoping that some heavy object would leap off it into my hand.

  “And who are you two?”

  “A pair of waxwork dummies,” snipped Mrs. M.

  “Try not to annoy him.” I gave her a nudge.

  “That’s right!” He waved the gun around some more. “I’ve got a real nasty temper and would as soon shoot your lights out as look at you.”

  “Be our guest,” responded the comic in our midst, without so much as a quiver. “It’s not like we pay the electricity bill. If you’ve got eyes in your head behind those stupid glasses one look around this place will show you that me and Mrs. H… Hodgkins here are giving it to you straight. Mr. Jugg’s not hiding under the desk or in the washbasin. He’s off on his holidays. Can’t say where he’s gone or when he’ll be back.”

  “Don’t you neither of you move while I check out the joint.” The man sidled toward the door leading to the loo and after a look inside opened the one to the broom cupboard. He was in his mid to late thirties. The brim of his hat was tipped down over his nose, and his shoulders hunched. A memory, a vague sense of familiarity, prodded at my mind. Was that why I wasn’t trembling with terror. Because he made me think of a bad actor in an even worse movie. Or had I seen him somewhere, quite recently? This evening? I had the answer before he was fully facing us once more.

  “You’re the man in the café. You were sitting at a table by the window reading, or pretending to read a newspaper.”

  “So what if I was?”

  “Just being chatty, that’s always her way.” Mrs. Malloy draped a comradely arm around my shoulder.

  “You shut your gob, tiger lady, or I’ll have you stuffed and hung on a wall.” He had stopped twitching his feet and held the gun steady. “Now you two dames hear me good and clear. You’re to get hold of your boss on the double and give him a message from me. He’s to tell old Lady Crumb Cake she needs to stop making up stories or someone will see she’s locked up in the loony bin and stays there. If he don’t he’ll be just one other P. I. that doesn’t show up for business as usual.”

  “Could you give us your business card?” I was able to be flippant because I was sure now he wasn’t going to kill us, unless we were stupid enough to follow him down the stairs and try to get the license plate number if he made off in a car. Although surely any self-respecting thug would know enough to melt into the shadows before hopping aboard public transportation or slipping into a waiting vehicle. I continued to muse along these lines when the door closed behind him and for several moments after his footsteps faded into silence. Of course I knew what Mrs. Malloy was about to say before she opened her mouth.

  “That puts the case in a different light. Someone who isn’t Flossie Jones seems to be up to tricks. And something’s got to be done about it. You can’t get away from that now, Mrs. H.”<
br />
  Six

  The moon huddled behind a threadbare blanket of cloud. It was no longer raining, but the wind shook the trees as if intent on rattling some sense into their leafless heads. It was well after midnight when I dropped Mrs. Malloy off at her house in Herring Street close to the center of Chitterton Fells. And I did so without making any promises. Wasn’t it enough that I had allowed her to talk me out of contacting the police in regard to the man we called Have Gun Will Travel, on the grounds that Mr. Jugg would not appreciate official interference? Her posture as she went up the path to her front door let me know in no uncertain terms what she thought of my saying I would sleep on the Lady Krumley situation. The wind slammed the front door behind her causing the forsythia bush to cower against the wall.

  Feeling exhausted but strung up, I drove on home through the square with its tower clock and jostle of Tudor-style buildings. At the corner of Market Street and Spittle Lane I passed Abigail’s. Shortly after Ben and I were married he had opened it as a restaurant serving fabulous French food. A year or so ago, when he decided he wanted to spend more time writing his cookery books, he had turned the ground floor into a coffee shop and let the upstairs to an elderly man in Edwardian dress with a dusty moustache who specialized in the sale of botanical and ornithological prints. The two businesses complemented each other nicely.

  Driving up the Cliff Road I thought about Lady Krumley’s obsession with Flossie Jones’s deathbed curse. Was there some connecting piece of information her ladyship had withheld from Mrs. Malloy and me? Something that would explain the arrival of Have Gun Will Travel? Nudging around a bend in the road I thought about the flower pots thrown at her ladyship’s car. In the new light of things it would seem someone had tried to prevent her from keeping her appointment with Milk Jugg. But Lady Krumley had not turned around and gone home as might have been hoped. Presumably, she had found a place to temporarily deal with her shattered window, making her several hours late in reaching Mucklesby. Was Have Gun responsible for that act of vandalism? Or had someone contacted him afterward to say that Plan A had failed and he was to proceed with Plan B?

  The road grew darker as it climbed the cliffs. A spatter of rain hit the car windows and with the sound of the windscreen wipers going irritably into action I became suddenly aware that every bone and muscle in my body ached from the work I had done shifting furniture and lifting boxes in Ben’s study.

  Fortunately I was now almost home. St. Anselm’s Church came into sight on my left. The vicarage looked cold and pinched-face in the drizzle. The veiled moon cast an eerie light on the graveyard. Its tombstones had life and movement to them as if they were staggering with excruciating slowness toward me through the tufted grass, which also moved in waves as if to suggest that beneath the ground old bones stirred and stretched and skeletal hands reached upward to claw their way to the surface. Where, I wondered, was Flossie Jones buried.

  A moment later I was driving through the gates of Merlin’s Court and parking the car in the old stables. I let myself in through the garden door. In the hall I took off my raincoat and tossed it onto the trestle table. There was, I thought, setting down my handbag, the distinct possibility that Ben would already be in bed and asleep, giving me the whole night to lie awake and worry myself sick rather than face up to our quarrel and get it behind us. If it could be put into the past? Remembering his face when he looked at the new computer I wasn’t overly optimistic. Would Kathleen Ambleforth kill me if I rang her up at this late hour and explained my dilemma and the urgent need for the immediate return of my husband’s old manual typewriter? At a pinch the rest of the stuff could wait until morning.

  My hand reached for the phone, but the twin suits of armor standing against the staircase wall suggested by the very blankness of their expressions that I would be making a big mistake in dragging Kathleen away from her hot water bottle. Or worse, I might get the vicar himself on the phone and he-being the dear befuddled soul that he is-would get everything mixed up. A vanload of pews along with the church organ, and possibly the organist herself in flannel nightie and curlers, could show up at my door to be disposed of, causing Ben to accuse me of making a further mess of things.

  The kitchen light, along with the ones in the hall, had been on when I came in, and narrow strips of light gleamed beneath the closed doors of the dining room and drawing room. I couldn’t bring myself to look toward the study. But this excess of electricity did not necessarily mean that Ben was still up. He was inclined to be careless about switching off lights. A peek into the drawing room found it empty. When I came out I saw a man winding the grandfather clock that stood in an alcove facing the front door. He had his back to me, but there was no mistaking my cousin Freddy for a madman who broke into people’s houses to make sure that they kept time with Big Ben under the illusion that any discrepancy would permanently disrupt Greenwich Mean Time. Freddy’s straggly ponytail and dangling skull and crossbones earring were always a dead give-away.

  “Hi coz!” He shifted his lanky six-foot frame in my direction and stuck his hands in his ragged jeans pockets. “Where did you spring from?”

  “I spent the evening with Mrs. Malloy. Where’s Ben?”

  “In the study.” Freddy stood tugging at his scroungy-looking beard. “Ellie, I think you’ve made a really big mistake this time.”

  “You mean,” my voice trembled, “he’s sitting in there… wallowing?”

  “More a case of a man in a trance. I don’t want to be overly pessimistic,” Freddy said, shaking his head so that the earring rattled, “but I’ve got the feeling that it could be a long time before Ben comes out of this. I’ve been sitting with him for an hour or more and he didn’t seem to know I was there.”

  “Oh, Freddy!”

  “Maybe he’ll snap out of it.” He spoke with a complete absence of conviction. “Perhaps you could exert your feminine wiles, Ellie. Light some candles, put on some soft music, play the pitiful little woman to the hilt. It’s a shame,” Freddy flapped an arm around my shoulders, “that you don’t have some alarming crisis to drop in his lap to make him realize that he can’t let anything come between you.”

  “I suppose I could mention that a man pointed a gun at Mrs. Malloy and me,” I responded despondently. “But would that be enough to do it? It’s not as though he shot us. I’m not staggering around with a bullet in my head with the possibility of only fifteen minutes to live.”

  “A man with a gun?” Freddy looked as he had done when we were children and he had accused me of having all the fun when I came out with some weird rash and couldn’t go to school until a medical name could be found for it.

  “Forget it,” I muttered. Ben had come out into the hall. Suddenly I was all at sixes and sevens about mentioning the incident to him. He’d be horribly alarmed and concerned for my future safety, which would push my revamping of his study into the background where it would molder and perhaps never be properly addressed, thus leaving a permanent scar. There was, it must be admitted, another reason for my keeping quiet. Knowing all, Ben would insist on my keeping my nose out of the Krumley affair. And I wasn’t sure I could do that. Not because of how Mrs. Malloy would feel about my defection, but because I felt a certain responsibility to her ladyship. I wished now that I hadn’t said anything to Freddy. But more than anything else I wished Ben would look as though he was thrilled out of his mind to see me.

  “So you’re back,” he smiled at me. A pleasant enough smile. But one that reminded me of the vicar’s benign bafflement at the sight of someone with whom he had been talking not five minutes before.

  I could feel myself sinking waist deep into despondency. Freddy in an unusually tactful attempt to ease into the background went clanking up against one of the suits of armor. Ben didn’t blink let alone glance in the direction of the ensuing cacophony. Neither did he relax that fixed smile. Which set me to babbling about not having expected to be gone so long and my need to check on the children.

  “No need for you
to worry. I looked in on them several times, Ellie.”

  I was consoling myself that he hadn’t blocked me out to the point of forgetting my name when Freddy corrected him. “You talked about going up, but remember… I went instead?”

  “So you did.”

  “It doesn’t matter which one handled the spot checks,” I responded heartily. “So long as they’re snugly tucked in for the night.”

  “How about I make us all a cup of cocoa?” My cousin’s helpfulness was truly heartwarming, but I wished very much that he would trot back down to his cottage and leave me to try put things right with Ben. It was no use. Upon his offer of a night-cap being declined he followed us into the drawing room and planted himself in a chair with every appearance of remaining there until a van showed up to collect him for one of Kathleen Ambleforth’s charities.

  It was, in my opinion, a lovely room with latticed windows at each end, a rose and turquoise carpet in the middle of the parquet floor and a pair of ivory damask sofas and several Queen Anne chairs grouped around the fireplace. Above the mantel hung a portrait of Abigail, who had been mistress of Merlin’s Court almost a century ago. Her restful pose and serenity of expression added to the tranquility of the muted color scheme. Even when the children were fighting over a ball that bounced off the secretary desk onto the top of the glass-fronted bookcase or playing hide and seek under the coffee table or behind the brocade curtains I felt anchored in this room-to its history and my present life. This evening was different. I was cast adrift, buffeted by waves of unease, sinking ever deeper into a whirlpool of uncertainty. Ben was pacing up and down in front of the fireplace. Once or twice he glanced to where I sat on the edge of a chair, but he had yet to ask how my evening with Mrs. Malloy had gone. Nor had he said a word about the study.

  Freddy shifted his feet onto a footstool, yawned hugely, scratched his beard and closed his eyes. I waited a few moments for him to start snoring and plunged into a garbled apology of the sort that would have brought a husband in a romance novel to his knees with a rose from the nearest flower vase between his teeth.