The Numbered Account by Ann Bridge

host.
    â€˜Jean-Pierre de Ritter? He is one of the world’s charmers. So was his father, whom I knew very well indeed. They are an old Berne family.’ There followed details of inter-marriages with Waechters and Carmenzinds.
    Julia waited anxiously for Colin’s letter next day. It didn’t come by the first post, but she took occasion to tell Mrs. Hathaway that she would probably have to go away for a day or two, on a job for Colin—she knew that Watkins would have reported his telephone call to her mistress.
    â€˜More Secret Service work?’ Mrs. Hathaway asked. ‘You know, my dear child, I do think they ought soon to start
paying
you for what you do. It all comes out of the Estimates, after all—which means out of our pockets—and I don’t see why the Government should have your services free.’
    â€˜Oh, this is a private thing of Colin’s,’ Julia assured her blithely. ‘Nothing to do with the Secret Service at all.’
    But Colin’s letter, which arrived by the second post, promptly disillusioned her on that score.
    â€˜This business is turning out much more serious and more tiresome than I thought when I asked you to take it on,’ he wrote. ‘It seems that the old boy, along with his money, deposited some rather hideously important papers. I only heard this when I was having supper with H. last night. He’s in rather a flap about it, as indeed everyoneis, because we’ve heard that some
most
undesirable characters are onto this too, and may be taking rapid action of some sort about it. I didn’t gather exactly what, but it is quite menacing. And when I mentioned that you were actually going to see you-know-who, H. begged me to lay you on and get you to function as quickly as possible. (He doesn’t care to write to you himself, naturally.) But he laid it on me to tell you that it is really vital, repeat vital, that you should get these papers away from where they are and into your own keeping as fast as you possibly can.
    â€˜So please get cracking, darling. Wire me when you are going, darling darling. Endless love, C.’
    Julia sat on her pretty shaded balcony looking out at the silver gleam of late spring snow on the mountains across the lake, and frowned over this missive. Hugh again! How tedious to be mixed up in yet another of his jobs. But neither she nor Colin had ever used their call-note ‘darling darling’ to the other in vain; if she couldn’t help Colin without helping Hugh, so much the worse—but she would help Colin, come Hell and high water. She went and procured a couple of telegraph forms from old Herr Waechter—she guessed, rightly, that he was a person who still kept telegraph forms in his house—and presently took a telegram, neatly printed in block capitals, down to the small post-office. She was careful to use Colin’s home address. The message read: ‘Yes I will darling but how tiresome stop Starting tomorrow. Love.’ She signed it ‘Darling’. The fatherly old man in the post-office put on his spectacles to spell all this out. ‘Darling shall mean
Liebchen
, not?’ he asked smiling—and Julia, smiling too, said
‘Jawohl
’.
    She refused a drive with Herr Waechter because she wanted to catch the afternoon post with a letter by air to Colin—sitting in her little
salon
she wrote hurriedly that she was going next day to see ‘the parson person’; it was all laid on, and she would do her best. In view of what both Petrus and Herr Waechter had said she added: ‘What I haven’t got, and
must have
, is a death certificate—they won’t play without. You must take my word for this; I learned it quite by accident, but I
know
. If you can get it in twenty-four hours, post to the Parsonage; if it takes longer than that, probably better send here.’
    She paused at that point, and read Colin’s letter through again. The