Bath Belles by Joan Smith Page B

own policy money, and pay their losses out of their own pockets.”
    “He must be very rich!”Esther said bluntly.
    “A regular nabob,”Two Legs assured her.
    “Which is not to say he has the right to be searching Miss Haley’s house for the money,”Yootha said firmly. “That was an ordinary business loss, to be expected. That’s why we pay them so much to buy our insurance.”
    I began to perceive all the same that with such people as Yootha Mailer involved, Mr. Maitland was wise to try to recover his money. My only resentment was that he hadn’t been more straightforward about it. It was a slight against my character for him to feel the necessity of so much lying and conniving. I would gladly have given him permission to search to his heart’s content and would tell him so next time we met—if we met again. I had a strong feeling it would take more than disclosure as a liar to keep Mr. Maitland away.
    “Did he find it?”Mr. Thomson asked eagerly.
    “No, he didn’t, and he ransacked the house from top to bottom,”I assured them.
    Assurance wasn’t enough. Mr. Thomson had to repeat the procedure for himself, using the pretext that he was just examining the house closely with an eye to buying it. I went with him and Yootha every step of the way. If anyone was going to find that money, it was going to be me. Graham’s honor was not really at stake, but I wanted to perform this last office for him. I noticed scratch marks on the locks of the trunks in the attic. Clearly the redoubtable Grant had pried them open and seen the blankets. The search convinced us all that there wasn’t so much as a comb hidden in the house.
    After the tour we returned to the saloon for sherry. Mr. Thomson displayed not the slightest interest in offering for the house. All he wanted to talk about was the money. He and Yootha reiterated that the money must be here, or why did people keep coming to look for it? But in the end we all realized that the only one who knew was the man who had killed Graham; and as no one knew who that was, the rest was mere conjecture.
    “The servants might be able to tell us something,”Mama thought.
    “There were none here that night,”Yootha said. “Meadows, his man of all work, had gone home, and his female servant didn’t sleep in. Graham was alone. The police looked into all that.”
    “It seems odd that Graham would let anyone in, when he must have suspected he might be followed. But then I daresay the fellow broke in,”Mama said, and shook her head sadly.
    “There was no sign of forced entry, nor any windows broken. Nothing like that,”Yootha said.
    “It could have been someone Graham knew, for that matter. Someone he had no reason to suspect,”Mr. Thomson mentioned.
    “Good gracious, Two Legs,”Yootha interjected, “Graham hadn’t told anyone. Pelty enjoined us to be very quiet about the whole matter. I told no one but you. And you were with me at a rout that night, so I know you had nothing to do with it,”she added, with a sharp look that petered out to a laugh.
    “Mr. Pelty?”I asked.
    “The other fellow from Lloyd’s who was Maitland’s partner,”Mrs. Mailer explained. “It seems that when the value of an insured object is high, the agents will sometimes go snacks, and it was a Mr. Pelty who shared the risk on my necklace with Maitland. Mr. Pelty was quite agreeable to paying me the money; it was Maitland who arranged with some of his unsavory criminal friends to exchange part of the money for the jewel. Mr. Maitland was called home suddenly to Devon that day, and so Pelty was left alone to arrange the matter. If it hadn’t been for Pelty, we would never have known the details. Maitland was a regular oyster, and no polite one, either.”
    Without thinking what I was saying, I heard myself reply, “That’s too bad.”Yootha gave me a quick frown, and I changed the subject. But what flitted through my mind was that if Mr. Maitland had been in charge, perhaps Graham