Free Look to the Lady by Margery Allingham

but he put the subject from him testily. It could not have any significance in the present business or he would surely have been told.
    Presently he closed the window and crossed to the table, where the best dinner that Mrs Bullock could conjure was set waiting for him. He ate absently, pausing every now and then to listen intently to the gentle noises of the countryside.
    But it was not until early the following morning, as he lay upon a home-cured feather bed beneath an old crocheted quilt of weird and wonderful design, that the storm broke.
    He was awakened by a furious tattoo on his door and raised himself upon his elbow to find Mrs Bullock, pink and horror-stricken.
    â€˜Oh, sir,’ she said, ‘as Mr Val’s friend, I think you ought to go up to the Tower at once. It’s Lady Pethwick, sir, Mr Val’s aunt. They brought her in this morning, sir – stone dead.’

CHAPTER 7
Death in the House
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    T HE Tower at Sanctuary managed to be beautiful in spite of itself. It stood at the top of the hill almost hidden in great clumps of oak and cedar trees with half a mile of park surrounding it in all directions. It was a mass of survivals, consisting of excellent examples of almost every period in English architecture.
    Its centre was Tudor with a Georgian front; the west wing was Queen Anne; but the oldest part, and by far the most important, was the east wing, from which the house got its name. This was a great pile of old Saxon stone and Roman brick, circular in shape, rising up to a turreted tower a good sixty feet above the rest of the building. The enormously thick walls were decorated with a much later stone tracery near the top, and were studded with little windows, behind one of which, it was whispered, lay the room to which there was no door.
    In spite of the odd conglomeration of periods, there was something peculiarly attractive and even majestic in the old pile. To start with, its size was prodigious, even for a country mansion. Every age had enlarged it.
    The slight signs of neglect which a sudden rise in the cost of labour combined with a strangling land tax had induced upon the lawns and gardens had succeeded only in mellowing and softening the pretentiousness of the estate, and in the haze of the morning it looked kindly and inviting in spite of the fact that the doctor’s venerable motor-car stood outside the square doorway and the blinds were drawn in all the front windows.
    Val and Penny were standing by the window in a big shabby room at the back of the west wing. It had been their nursery when they were children, and had been regarded by them ever since as their own special domain. There were still old toys in the wide cupboards behind the yellow-white panelling, and the plain heavy furniture was battered and homely.
    The view from the window, half obscured by the leaves of an enormous oak, led the eye down the steep green hill-side to where a white road meandered away and lost itself among the fields which stretched as far as the horizon.
    The scene was incredibly lovely, but the young people were not particularly impressed. Penny was very pale. She seemed to have grown several years older since the night before. Her plain white frock enhanced the pallor of her face, and her eyes seemed to have become wider and more deep in colour. Val, too, was considerably shaken.
    â€˜Look here,’ he said, ‘I’ve sent word down for Campion to come up as we arranged before. It was just Aunt’s heart, of course, but it’s awkward happening like this. I thought she was disgustingly full of beans at dinner last night.’ He pulled himself up. ‘I know I ought not to talk about her like this,’ he said apologetically, ‘still, it’s silly to pretend that we liked her.’
    He was silent for a moment, and then went on gloomily, ‘The village will be seething with it, of course. Being picked up in the Pharisees’ Clearing like that. What on