Chapter 6 #2
“So you’ve heard already.” Daisy sighed, going to peer into the hooded back of the car. “Mel, come along, do. I’m getting wet. I’ll tell you what I can, and probably more than I ought.”
“Oh, Daisy dear, how dreadful for you!” Melanie Germond’s husband was the local bank manager, as Alec’s father had been. As his wife, Mel was eminently acceptable to St. John’s Wood society, but she was frightfully shy.
Despite this handicap, she had championed the Prasads’ entrée into the social life of the neighbourhood, though there were still plenty of houses where the Indian couple
were not invited. These had, until Daisy’s marriage, included the Fletcher household under old Mrs. Fletcher’s sway. Daisy had met both women through Belinda’s school, and had grown very fond them.
“Kesin,” Daisy said to the chauffeur, “if you go to the kitchen, Dobson will give you a cup of tea.”
“Sank you, madam.” He bowed to her, hands folded together, and looked to Sakari, who nodded. He went off to the kitchen door while Daisy took her friends into the house.
The girls were already in the dining room, chattering over a lavish spread laid out in advance by Dobson. Daisy, pausing in the doorway, hoped the cook-maid had saved some cake and biscuits for the grown-ups.
Belinda saw her. “I told Gran I’m home, Mummy, and I said you are too, so she needn’t bother with us.”
“Right-oh, darling. Don’t forget to take Nana out, between showers.”
So Bel had neatly evaded a confrontation with her grandmother over Deva, leaving Daisy to face her unprepared mother-in-law with Sakari in tow.
Daisy wondered whether Mrs. Fletcher had already heard about the murder.
Her involvement was bound to be another bone of contention.
Not that there would be a vulgar row, just pointed arrows sent her way at every opportunity.
Swallowing a sigh, she led the way to the sitting room.
Mrs. Fletcher’s lips tightened when she saw the Indian woman.
Her cold “How do you do” was aimed somewhere between Sakari and Mel.
Placing a bookmark in the book she had been reading, she stood up.
“I’m glad you’re home at last, Daisy. Will you keep an eye on the children? I have one or two errands to run.”
“Have you had tea, Mother?”
“I shall have mine at the tea shop in the High Street.” Thus making it plain—and no doubt telling any cronies she met there—that she had been driven from her home by her daughter-in-law’s insistence on entertaining unsuitable people. She stalked out, her drab silk skirts rustling reproachfully.
The room seemed the warmer for her absence.
It was a pleasant room, looking southwest over the back garden, now sunny again.
Alec’s first wife had had the ponderous “good” Victorian furniture reupholstered in gay prints and the walls painted white.
A cheerful view of Paris hung over the fireplace, in front of which, on a low table, Alec and Belinda’s unfinished chess game from last night awaited them.
“Sit down,” Daisy invited. “I simply must ring up Alec, but I won’t be a moment.”
“Clues!” Sakari pronounced gleefully. “You have thought of some clues which he missed.”
“I’m sure Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher wouldn’t miss any clues,” Mel protested.
“I can’t be sure, that’s why I must ring him. I’ll tell Dobson to bring tea.”
“Then you will return and tell us all.”
“Some of it, anyway,” Daisy promised, laughing.
Tom Tring answered the Talmadges’ ’phone. London operators were usually too busy to listen in, but she chose her words with care, just in case, as she told him about the alley and the errand boy and the incinerator.
“Maybe I should have come back to the house to tell you right away. If there was anything burning, it might be gone by now.”
“I shouldn’t worry, Mrs. Fletcher. Those things burn slow. We’ll have a look, but—I’ll tell you, though the Chief may have my hide for it—we found what I expect you’re thinking of in the waste bin in the surgery.”
“Oh, good. I nearly looked in there, but I couldn’t face it.”
“Nor you should have,” he said in what was supposed to be a reproving voice. Daisy could practically hear his splendid moustache twitching as it covered a grin. “The Chief sent young Ernie off with the stuff to the lab at the Yard, to make sure it’s what we were looking for.”
“I should think it must be. Dentists can’t have much use for that sort of thing.”
“Not unless they let the drill slip and—”
“Don’t, Tom!” Daisy exclaimed, reminded that she still had to see a dentist. “Did the servants have anything interesting to say?”
“Now, that I can’t tell you, Mrs. Fletcher, or the Chief really will have my hide. If that’s all, I’d better go and see to that incinerator. There might be something in it we haven’t thought of.”
“Just one thing more. Gladys told me Hilda Kidd and Cook—Mrs. Thorpe—often stopped talking when she went into the kitchen.”
“So Miss Gladys told me.”
“Right-oh, Tom. Cheerio, then.”
“‘Bye, Mrs. Fletcher, and thanks for the tips.”
Daisy said good-bye, hung up, and returned to the sitting room. Dobson had brought tea and biscuits, but Daisy was not allowed to enjoy them in peace. Though she tried not to tell her friends more than she ought, she was too tired to guard her tongue. She most definitely should not have let
slip that Alec was looking for patients who might have been having an affair with Raymond Talmadge.
“Oh dear, I hope neither of you was a patient of his?”
Sakari and Mel exchanged a look.
“We both went to him once or twice,” said Sakari. “And we both, independently, disliked his attitude more than we liked his expertise.”
“His attitude?”
“Condescending,” Mel said in her soft voice.
“He thought he was the cat’s pyjamas. What is more to the point, he did not trouble to hide his contempt for those of us who have not been blessed with perfect teeth.
I am sure—do you not agree, Mel?—that Raymond Talmadge would never make love to a woman with whose rotting teeth he was intimately acquainted. ”