Free A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey Page A

beard, I notice.” Grant nodded at Harmer’s unshaven
chin.
    “Yes. Have to shave twice a day, sometimes. If I’m going to be out late.
Why?”
    “You were shaved when you arrived at Miss Clay’s cottage. How was
that?”
    “Carry my shaving things in the car. Have to, when you have a beard like
mine.”
    “So you had no breakfast that morning?”
    “No, I was planning to get breakfast from Chris. I don’t eat breakfast
anyway. Just coffee, or orange juice. Orange juice in England. My God, your
coffee—what do you think they do to it? The women, I mean.
It’s—”
    “Leaving the coffee aside for a moment, shall we come to the main point?
Why did you tell the sergeant on duty that you had slept at Sandwich?”
    The man’s face changed subtly. Until then he had been answering at ease,
automatically; the curves of his broad, normally good-natured face slack and
amiable. Now the slackness went; the face grew wary, and—was
it?—antagonistic.
    “Because I felt there was something wrong, and I didn’t want to be mixed
up in it.”
    “That is very extraordinary, surely? I mean, that you should be conscious
of evil before anyone knew that it existed.”
    “That’s not so funny. They told me Chris was drowned. I knew Chris could
swim like an eel. I knew that I had been out all night. And the sergeant was
looking at me with a Who-are-you-and-what-are-you-doing-here expression.”
    “But the sergeant had no idea that the drowning was more than an accident.
He had no reason to look at you in that way.”
    Then he decided to drop the subject of Harmer’s lie to the sergeant.
    “How did you know, by the way, where to find Miss Clay? I understood that
she kept her retreat a secret.”
    “Yes, she’d run away. Gave us all the runaround, in fact, including me.
She was tired and not very pleased at the way her last picture had turned
out. On the floor, I mean; it isn’t released yet. Coyne didn’t know how to
take her. A bit in awe of her, and afraid at the same time she’d put one over
on him. You know. If he’d called her ‘kid’ and ‘chocolate’ the way old Joe
Myers used to back in the States, she’d have laughed and worked like a black
for him. But Coyne’s full of his own dignity, the ‘big director’ stuff, and
so they didn’t get on too good. So she was fed up, and tired, and everyone
wanted her to go to different places for holidays, and it seemed she couldn’t
make up her mind, and then one day we woke up and she wasn’t there.
Bundle—that’s her housekeeper—said she didn’t know where she was,
but no letters were to be forwarded and she’d turn up again in a month, so no
one was to worry. Well, for about a fortnight no one heard of her, and then
last Tuesday I met Marta Hallard at a sherry party at Libby
Seemon’s—she’s going into that new play of his—and she said that
on Saturday she had run into Chris buying chocolates at a place in Baker
Street—Chris never could resist chocolates between pictures!—and
she tried to worm out of Chris where she was hiding out. But Chris wasn’t
giving anything away. At least she thought she wasn’t. She said: ‘Perhaps I’m
never coming back. You know that old Roman who grew vegetables with his own
hands and was so stuck on the result that he made the arrangement permanent.
Well, yesterday I helped pull the first cherries for Covent Garden market
and, believe me, getting the Academy Award for a picture is nothing to
it!’”
    Harmer laughed under his breath. “I can hear her,” he said,
affectionately. “Well, I went straight from Seemon’s to Covent Garden and
found out where those cherries came from. An orchard at a place called Bird’s
Green. And on Wednesday morning bright and early Jason sets off for Bird’s
Green. That took a bit of finding, but I got there about three o’clock. Then
I had to find the orchard and the people who were working in it on Friday. I
expected to find