Free Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham Page B

girls joined them and they all piled into the huge old-fashioned car. They dropped Ann in King’s Parade and hurried on. The shock seemed to have silenced Joyce after her first outburst, for she sat huddled up beside Marcus, who was driving, and said nothing until they were safely in the drive leading up to Socrates Close.
    In the morning sun the old house looked much less forbiddingthan it had done the night before. The virginia creeper and ivy had softened the severity of the actual building and it was spruce and well-kept in the Victorian manner, a rarity in these days of expensive labour.
    The doctor’s runabout stood before the door, and they pulled up short to avoid it. A plump middle-aged woman in a cap and apron admitted them. She was a little dishevelled and had evidently been crying. She greeted Joyce with a watery smile.
    â€˜Mrs Faraday isn’t down yet, miss,’ she said in a whisper. ‘She said would the gentlemen wait for her in the morning-room. But Mr William and his sister are there.’
    â€˜That’ll be all right, Alice,’ Joyce spoke wearily.
    The hall they had entered was large and gloomy. Nevertheless, the house exuded a solid Victorian welcome, a welcome of Turkey carpets and mediocre oil-paintings in ample gilt frames, of red damask wallpapers and the sober magnificence of heavy brass ornaments. But to two of the young people at least all this was subdued into a feeling of oppression: they knew the history of its inmates, and for them this great comfortable dwelling was a place of unknown horrors, of strange lumber from the lives of the family which had lived there ever since it had been built. To them it was a hot-bed, a breeding ground of those dark offshoots of the civilized mind which the scientists tell us are the natural outcome of repressions and inhibitions. To them the old house was undergoing an upheaval, a volcano of long fermented trouble, and they were afraid of what they were about to find.
    They were taking off their things when the door opposite them opened and Uncle William’s puffy red face appeared in the opening. He came forward with slightly exaggerated affability.
    â€˜I’m glad to see you – both of you,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ve heard our terrible news? Julia now. Come in, will you? I believe my mother’ll be down in a moment or two. She’s upstairs just now talking to Doctor Lavrock. I suppose the man knows his business.’
    He escorted them into a room that would have been sunlit had it not been for the light Holland blinds drawn down over the two windows which faced the drive. This, it was evident,was the main family sitting-room. Originally intended for a breakfast-room, it naturally retained a great deal of its original furniture. The mahogany breakfast table and sideboard shone as only well-cared-for mahogany can shine. The glazed chintz was slightly faded with much washing, and there were dents in the green leather arm-chairs by the immense marble fireplace which suggested long use, each by its own particular owner. Here were water-colours, old-fashioned too, whose naïve charm was bringing them rapidly back into fashion.
    Uncle William, in carpet slippers, seemed a shabbier, less bounding figure in the morning light, and his military air had almost entirely vanished.
    â€˜Here’s Kitty,’ he said, adding in a bellowed whisper: ‘I’ve been trying to comfort her, poor creature.’
    Aunt Kitty, quite as much flustered by the thought of meeting strangers red-eyed as by her tragic experience of the morning, rose from a low chair by the fire. She was a pathetic little woman, much older than her years, which were less than sixty. She was a fussy little person, fussily clothed in a black frock with tiny ruffles at the neck and sleeves. She was, too, the only woman Campion had ever seen in his life who wore a large gold watch attached by a bow-shaped gold brooch to her hollow bosom.