Free Death Comes to Cambers by E.R. Punshon Page B

with the teeth also a little large and slightly irregular. But the eyes were magnificent – soft and bright, and veiled behind long drooping lashes that seemed to lend to them a dark mysterious melancholy. A striking young woman, Bobby decided, and one of many possibilities, not likely to occupy for long the humble and subordinate position of a maid, even a personal and favourite maid.
    Colonel Lawson, too, and his superintendent, Moulland, were both visibly impressed by the girl’s looks and personality, and the chief constable, generally exceedingly conscious of the great gulf that marked him off from his social or official inferiors, began to put his questions to her in a tone that was at first almost deferential. She gave her name and age – this last with a slight haughty lifting of the eyebrows as if she did not see the relevance of the question but would pass it over this once – and explained that she had been brought up by her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Dene, who kept the village grocery-shop and were the parents of Eddy Dene, who was their assistant in the shop and archaeologist in his spare time. As there was hardly enough business in the shop to keep her occupied, and as she had no taste for the work, she had left it to enter Lady Cambers’s service. She had been with Lady Cambers, as her personal maid, for about a year, and it was partly through her that her mistress’s interest had been aroused in Eddy, and in certain theories and beliefs of his.
    She answered all the questions put to her quite freely and with apparent frankness, and yet there still remained about her a curious air of reticence, as though there were many things on many subjects that she would never tell. One had the impression that her inner life was a secret she guarded well, and Bobby, beginning now to remember something he had heard vaguely in talk by Lady Cambers and paid no attention to at the time, took advantage of an interval in the questioning to tear a page from the notebook he was using, and write on it a few words which he passed to Colonel Lawson. The chief constable read it, crumpled it up, and remarked: ‘Oh, by the way, I believe you are engaged to young Dene, aren’t you?’
    For the first time Amy hesitated before answering, and for the first time seemed to become aware of the presence of Bobby as an actual personality. Her glance swept over him, disapproved of him, found him impertinent, forgot him, and Bobby decided that for some reason this reference to her engagement was unwelcome. She said, in her quiet way: ‘It has always been the wish of my uncle and aunt.’
    â€˜But not yours, perhaps?’ suggested Colonel Lawson.
    Amy let the question pass unanswered. She had the air of not having heard it, and Colonel Lawson found himself flushing slightly. It was quite ridiculously as if he had been put in his place – a chief constable by a lady’s maid! Possibly the question was not quite relevant to the inquiry, and at any rate she plainly considered it an intrusion into her private affairs she did not intend to encourage. Lawson left the point, and went on to question her about the alleged dispute or quarrel with her mistress.
    â€˜Oh, yes,’ she said at once, ‘I remember – Lady Cambers was dreadfully angry. You see, it was most awfully stupid of me, but I had put all her stockings away without mending them. I can’t think how it happened. Every time she got a pair out to change, there was a hole in them. She nearly threw them at me, and the more I tried to say how sorry I was, the angrier she got. I just ran straight upstairs and had a good cry.’
    It was the longest answer she had given yet, the most fluent, the most apparently candid. Colonel Lawson and Superintendent Moulland looked at each other. Bobby sucked the end of his pencil, and looked at her. She sat quiet and still and unconcerned, her dark mysterious eyes fixed upon the wall opposite