Outrageous Fortune by Patricia Wentworth

drank another cup of tea, and was glad that her name was Caroline, and not a name that just anyone might have. She had, of course, never heard of old Caroline Bussell who was housekeeper at Packham Hall.
    Well, if the snatching Mrs Riddell had stolen Jim Randal, she had got to be found. The bother was that Caroline hadn’t any idea of where to look for her. She didn’t even know what sort of car she was driving or anything. She supposed she would have to ring up the hospital and find out—and then it would probably be a Morris, or a baby Austin, or something that was as thick on the roads as—as—earwigs. Here Caroline brushed away no less than three.
    And then she remembered the folded paper which the day sister had given her to take to Mrs Riddell. “The ward maid picked it up. We think it must have dropped out of her bag.” That was what the day sister had said. And Caroline had just let it go right through her head and out at the other side. She opened her bag in a hurry, found the paper, and spread it out. It was a bill—one of the flimsy black-lined sort that a girl scribbles on in a carbon-papered book and then gets the shop-walker to sign.
    Caroline tingled all over with excitement as she looked at it. It was, in her vocabulary, “absolutely stuffed with meat.” To start with, there was the name of the shop—Smithies, Ironmongers. And then there was the address—29 Market Street, Ledlington. Lastly there was the bill itself—One purdonium, 19/11.
    â€œFor the love of Mike—what’s a purdonium?” said Caroline solemnly, and then all at once remembered Mrs Pocklington’s sale. Coalscuttles became purdoniums—or was it purdonii—or purdonia when they got into an auction. They evidently started life in iron-mongers’ shops under the same classic alias. Anyhow Mrs Riddell had bought a purdonium at a shop in Ledlington. Now, you might buy sweets, ribbons, tapes, or cotton anywhere, or a hot wherever it took your fancy; but if you bought a coalscuttle in Ledlington, the chances were that you lived somewhere near by and that you made them send it home. Of course you might take it away in a car—but coalscuttles do have the most revolting corners, and what would be the sense of scratching your car when Smithies might just as well deliver the blighted thing? After all, Smithies had got to do something to keep his end up.
    She paid for her tea, went down six moss-grown steps to the car, and pored over a map. Ledlington was a good fifty miles. She looked at her watch.… getting on for six. It was a clear impossibility to reach Mr Smithies before his shutters went up.
    Caroline slapped the map together and jammed it back in the pocket. She did hate not doing things at once. And it was waste of petrol too, because she would have to pass within twenty miles of Ledlington anyhow. It was not until she had run a dozen miles that she reflected on the state that Pansy Ann would have been in if she had gone off to Ledlington and not come home till midnight.
    The village of Hazelbury West is like a good many other English villages. There is a pond, and a green, a big house with stone pillars crowned by pineapples and a long neglected drive, a church, a parsonage, two or three houses of the better sort, a butcher, a baker, a general shop which is also the post-office, and a straggle of cottages.
    Miss Arbuthnot, who was Caroline Leigh’s first cousin once removed, lived in the last cottage on the left. Caroline lived there with her. Sometimes she wondered whether she was just going to go on living in Hazelbury West with Pansy Ann for ever and ever.
    Miss Arbuthnot had been christened Ann, but preferred to be called Pansy. She sketched a little, and gardened a little, and painted a little on china. She also wrote minor verse and belonged to a society under the rules of which all the members read one another’s compositions. Caroline called it The