Free The Listening Eye by Patricia Wentworth

my mixing my metaphors, because I’ve never been able to worry about that. I was earning my living when I was fourteen, and the books I bothered with were the ones that were going to help me to earn it. But to come back to Hubert Garratt. I wrote and told the bank he’d be fetching the necklace at twelve noon on Tuesday. Now the people who knew that were myself and the bank, Hubert Garratt, my daughter, and two other people. Early on Tuesday morning I was told that Garratt was ill. Since the war he has a tendency to asthma. I went to see him, and found him quite disabled, and told him he wasn’t to attempt to go for the necklace. I rang up the bank, spoke to the manager, and told him there was a change and I was sending Garratt’s assistant, a young fellow called Arthur Hughes. The manager took the precaution of ringing off and then ringing me back, and I gave him Arthur’s description and said he would show a letter from me naming him as Garratt’s substitute. Well, that all went off without a hitch. Arthur left the bank with the necklace, but he was shot dead in Cranberry Lane.”
    Miss Silver confided these details to the blue exercise book. Bellingdon watched her with an odd look upon his face. The pale blue knitting and the bright blue book, the pencil, the hair-net, the brooch which fastened the front of her olive-green cashmere, a rose carved out of a black bog-oak with an Irish pearl at its heart, all combined to make as unlikely a picture of a private detective as he could well imagine. He thought he could transplant her to Merefields without there being the slightest risk of her being taken for one. When she had finished writing she looked up.
    “And the other two people who were aware that the necklace was being fetched—was Mr. Hughes one of them?”
    “Well, no, he wasn’t. As far as I know, he knew nothing about the plan until I called him in and told him he would have to go to the bank for me instead of Garratt.”
    “You say as far as you know, Mr. Bellingdon.”
    “Oh, that? It meant nothing. Garratt said he didn’t mention it, and no one else would.”
    “And the other two people were?”
    He made a mental note that she could be pertinacious.
    “One of them is a guest in the house, and the other—there could be no possible connection.”
    Miss Silver gave a gentle cough.
    “If I am to help you, Mr. Bellingdon, it would be better that I should have all the facts. As Lord Tennyson so wisely says, ‘So trust me not at all or all in all.’ ”
    “Does he? Well, it might do with some people, but I wouldn’t like to say it would answer in every case. Anyhow there isn’t any question about trusting here. The two people are my late wife’s cousin, Elaine Bray—Miss Bray, who is kind enough to run Merefields for me—and Mrs. Scott who is a guest in the house.”
    Miss Silver remained in an attentive attitude. Without so much as a word or a look it was conveyed to Lucius Bellingdon that something further was expected. There are times when silence can be more particular than speech. Since the last thing he desired was any particularity in either of these two cases, he yielded the point with a trace of stubborn amusement.
    “Miss Bray took charge of my daughter and of the management of the house when my wife died. She had been living with us for some years as my wife was not strong. I owe her a good deal. Mrs. Scott—” he tried, with what success he was not certain, to keep his voice and manner as indifferent as might be— “Mrs. Scott is, as I said, a guest and a close personal friend.”
    Miss Silver wrote these things down. She also made a mental note that Mr. Bellingdon felt himself to be under an obligation to his late wife’s cousin, and that it was something of a burden to him. In the case of Mrs. Scott she had no difficulty in discerning a warmer feeling and the fact that he did not desire this feeling to appear. She wrote in her book, and heard him say with a note of relief in