Grave Mistake by Ngaio Marsh Page B

Quintern from Mardling and Mrs. Jim told me. Isn’t it
abysmal
! When we all thought he was safely stowed in Aussie.”
    “Are you staying tonight?”
    “There? With Claudie-boy? Not on your Nelly. I’m going to Mardling. Mr. Markos is back and we’ll tell him about us. He’ll be super about it. I ought to go.”
    “Shall I come to the car and say hullo to Gideon?”
    “Oh, you mustn’t trouble to do that. He’ll come,” Prunella said. She put a thumb and finger between her teeth, leant out of the window and emitted a piercing whistle. A powerful engine started up in the lane, a rakish sports model shot through the drive in reverse and pulled up at the front door. Gideon Markos leapt out.
    He really was an extremely good-looking, boy, thought Verity, but she could see, without for a moment accepting the disparagement, what Sybil had meant by her central European remark. He was an exotic. He looked like a Latin member of the jet set dressed by an English tailor. But his manner was unaffected as well as assured and his face alive with a readiness to be amused.
    “Miss Preston,” he said, “I gather you’re not only a godmother but expected to be a fairy one. Are you going to wave your wand and give us your blessing?”
    He put his arm round Prunella and talked away cheerfully about how he’d bullied her into accepting him. Verity thought he was exalted by his conquest and that he would be quite able to manage not only his wife but if need be his mother-in-law as well.
    “I expect Prue’s confided her misgivings,” he said, “about her mama being liable to cut up rough over us. I don’t quite see why she should take against me in such a big way, but perhaps that’s insufferable. Anyway I hope
you
don’t feel I’m not a good idea?” He looked quickly at her and added, “But then, of course, you don’t know me so that was a pretty gormless remark, wasn’t it?”
    “The early impression,” said Verity, “is not unfavourable.”
    “Well, thank the Lord for that,” said Gideon.
    “Darling,” breathed Prunella, “she’s coming to Greengages with us. You are, Godma, you know you are. To temper the wind. Sort of.”
    “That’s very kind of her,” he said and bowed to Verity.
    Verity knew she had been outmanoeuvered, but on the whole did not resent it. She saw them shoot off down the drive. It had been settled that they would visit Greengages on the coming Saturday but not, as Prunella put it, for a cabbage-water soup and minced grass luncheon. Gideon knew of a super restaurant en route.
    Verity was left with the feeling of having spent a day during which unsought events converged upon her and brought with them a sense of mounting unease, of threats, even. She suspected that the major ingredient of this discomfort was an extreme reluctance to suffer another confrontation with Basil Schramm.
    The following two days were uneventful but Thursday brought Mrs. Jim to Keys for her weekly attack upon floors and furniture. She reported that Claude Carter kept very much to his room up at Quintern, helped himself to the food left out for him and, she thought, didn’t answer the telephone. Beryl, who was engaged to sleep in while Sybil Foster was away, had said she didn’t fancy doing so with that Mr. Claude in residence. In the upshot the difficulty had been solved by Bruce, who offered to sleep in, using the coachman’s room over the garage formerly occupied by a chauffeur-handyman.
    “I knew Mrs. Foster wouldn’t have any objections to
that
,” said Mrs. Jim, with a stony glance out of the window.
    “Perhaps, though, she ought just to be asked, don’t you think?”
    “He done it,” said Mrs. Jim sparsely. “Bruce. He rung her up.”
    “At Greengages?”
    “That’s right, Miss. He’s been over there to see her,” she added. “Once a week. To take flowers and get orders. By bus. Of a Saturday. She pays.”
    Verity knew that she would be expected by her friends to snub Mrs. Jim for speaking in