[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair - Leslie Peter (электронная книга .txt) 📗

"Willco. Roger and out," Slate drawled in a burlesque Oxford accent. "Some investigators are made, not born — and this bird just dropped into my lap, as you might say. Not literally, of course. Not during office hours. But she did drop."

"Perhaps a little background first," April prompted.

"Right. Well, there's this chap… kind of a squire type — clean-limbed, rakish face, old but good tweeds, early middle-age. And the gent appears to have been doing a line with our Sheila, dazzling her with his worldliness and so forth. So much so that her fiance, the son of the circus, has a stand-up row with her about the man, threatening to do her in if she doesn't cut the said squire out. So much so that S.S. himself is the prime suspect in the eyes of many, he being the last person to have seen her alive."

"What would his motive have been — according to these many?"

"Well, that's just it, love. To stop his wife finding out about une petite affaire that had become too clinging and too troublesome — and therefore too dangerous. Only as it happened she knew already. And didn't mind, as I say."

"Now tell me how you know that."

"I was sitting in the Crabber last night — that's the pub where I'm staying — and I got into conversation with this woman. You know how it is."

"Yes," April said. "I know how it is."

"She was very much the county type — tall, you know, with that kind of ageless fair hair and rather well made-up. Good figure. Good conversationalist — and quite witty, too, as a matter of fact —"

"What was she wearing?" April interrupted.

"Waisted tweed jacket over a white polo-neck sweater, with jodhpurs and a cute little velvet cap. I think she had been out riding."

"You must be joking! ...Still, that would no doubt make the point she wanted to give satisfactorily."

"Look, you haven't even seen... Oh, never mind! Anyway, the conversation veered round to the local murder. All conversations here do, as you'll no doubt find out! And she said something like: 'Gerry — that's my husband — was rather fond of the girl. They used to see a lot of each other and they'd been as thick as thieves for months.' And I said: 'But don't you mind?' And she said no, she and her husband had an Understanding; each could go their own way, she said, and make whatever friends they liked. And if anyone specially attracted them, she said, they were free to react as they wished. And then she asked could she buy me a drink..."

"Oh, Mark, Mark!" April laughed. "Don't ever change, will you?" -

"Well, anyway, when I found out from the barman that 'Gerry' was Sir Gerald Wright, suspect number one in the case, and that he and his wife lived in a big house on the moors above the town, well, I thought it prudent to sit tight and hear what she wanted to tell me."

"How do you mean — what she wanted to tell you?"

"Well, all this was very nice — but it was just the tiniest bit contrived, you know. The dear lady came into the bar and sat down three tables away from me. She went to powder her nose — and when she came back she sat down only two tables away. Later she went to the bar itself and returned to ensconce herself at the next table to mine. And then, when a waiter came up, she asked him a question she knew very well he couldn't answer — but I could. Something about London. Naturally, he turned to me to ask. Naturally I replied — and there we were, talking. It was beautifully done, but it was a set-up."

"I see," April said slowly. "And what do you think it was that she wished to plant on you? The fact that her husband had no motive for murdering Sheila?"

"No, I don't think so. After all, how could she possibly know that I was investigating the killing — or even that I was interested in it? My mate Superintendent Curnow would have been the obvious recipient for that line."

"True. Perhaps she just arranged the meeting for the obvious reason: your animal attraction."

"You're very kind. But seriously, I believe she did have an — er — ulterior motive—"

"That's what I just said."

"— other than the obvious one. And I think she has already achieved her objective."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I think the bit about her husband and Sheila was simply a conversational gambit — one of several she made — and that the real purpose of the operation was just to scrape an acquaintance with me."

"But why, Mark?"

"We shall know later. Phase One was to get to know me. Having gained that objective, she was too clever to press further. But I'm certain that, in some way or another, the acquaintance is going to be exploited soon."

"You realize what that would imply, though, don't you?" April objected. "If anybody bothers to employ a subterfuge to get to know you — apparently just a newspaperman on assignment — then they must know, or suspect, that you are not what you appear to be."

"There's a possibility that I may be blown already. I know." He sighed.

"But good heavens, how? Who could possibly have found out?"

"That's what we have to find out, April."

"Yes. And that brings us back to Square One, doesn't it? If they — whoever they are — do know about you, then the woman might have had a reason for sowing the idea that her husband couldn't have killed Sheila, don't you see? For in that case she would in fact know that you were investigating the murder."

Slate was silent for a few minutes as he drove the car expertly through a series of tight bends which followed the course a stream along the bottom of the valley. He was frowning when he spoke again. "You're quite right, of course," he said. "The corollary is so simple that it had escaped me. But it adds up to the same thing: we must view any future contacts with the lady — or with her husband, for that matter — as potentially dubious. For the time being, at any rate... And that brings me to a suggestion I was going to make regarding your own modus operandi."

"Which is?"

"That as we have to allow for the possibility that I may be blown, it's obviously going to be much better if there's no apparent connection between us. If I'm suspect, obviously any stranger I'm seen with is also suspect."

"Of course."

"So, although it's going to be inconvenient, I propose that we act as though we had never met, once we get to Porthallow."

"Pass each other in the street with our respective noses in the air?"

"Precisely."

"Make like our beautiful friendship had never been?"

"Even so."

"Well, in that case you'd better drop me off somewhere before we get there, so that I can arrive independently by bus or something."

"If you bail out in one of the back streets of Helston and catch a bus, there's a train from London that you could have come by, a few minutes earlier," Mark said. "The bus will land you in Porthallow at four-thirty... Look, there's the fishing village called Mousehole down there. You can see why it's on every Cornish picture postcard and souvenir ashtray in the book, can't you! We'll be in Penzance in a few minutes."

He went over his actions since he had arrived from London, hour by hour, as they threaded their way through the grey streets of the town, skirted the great bay islanding the fortress village of St. Michael's Mount, and drove past the bleached waste of Prah Sands.

"But tell me, Mark," the girl asked — they had turned inland now, across the checkerboard of farming country where the sky above the bare branches was black with rooks — "tell me about these two attempts on your life. Do you think they were made just because you were with the policeman? Has anyone tried to get at him? Or do you read them as further evidence that you're blown?"