Mystery Mile. Margery Allingham
Universal Aunt, isn’t he? “Your adventures undertaken for a small fee.” Oh, I like Albert.’
Giles grinned.
‘I know you do,’ he said. ‘She’s prepared a school treat for him in the next room, St Swithin. One of these days she’ll put us in a home and go off with him.’
Biddy laughed and regarded them shrewdly out of the corners of her brown eyes.
‘I might,’ she said, ‘but he’s comic about women.’ She sighed.
‘He’s a comic chap altogether,’ said Giles. ‘Did I tell you, St Swithin, the last time I saw him we walked down Regent Street together, and from the corner of Conduit Street to the Circus we met five people he knew, including a viscountess and two bishops? Each one of them stopped and greeted him as an old pal. And every single one of them called him by a different name. Heaven knows how he does it.’
‘Addlepate will be glad to see him,’ said Biddy, patting the head of a sleek chestnut-brown dog who had just thrust his head into her lap. The dog looked self-conscious at hearing his name, and wagged his stump of tail with feverish enthusiasm.
Giles turned to the rector. ‘Albert said he tried to train Addlepate for crime before he gave it up as a bad job and brought him down to us. He said the flesh was willing but the mind was weak. I shall never forget,’ he went on, pulling at his pipe, ‘when we were up at Cambridge, hearing Albert explain to the porter after midnight that he was a werewolf out on his nightly prowl who had unexpectedly returned to his own shape before he had time to bound over the railings. He kept old . . .’
The sound of a motor horn among the elms outside interrupted him. Biddy sprang to her feet. ‘There he is,’ she said, and ran out to open the door to him herself. The other two followed her.
Through the rustling darkness they could just make out the outlines of a small two-seater, out of which there rose to greet them the thin figure they expected. He stood up in the car and posed before them, one hand upraised.
‘Came Dawn,’ he said, and the next moment was on the steps beside them. ‘Well, well, my little ones, how you have grown! It seems only yesterday, St Swithin, that you were babbling your infant prayers at my knee.’
They took him into the house, and as he sat eating in the low-ceilinged dining-room they crowded round him like children. Addlepate, grasping for the first time who it was, had a mild fit of canine hysterics by himself in the hall before he joined the others.
By common consent they left the question of the letting of the house until Mr Campion should mention it, and as he did not bring up the subject, but chattered on inconsequentially about everything else under the sun, there was no talk of it until they were once more seated round the library fire.
Mr Campion sat between Giles and Biddy. The firelight shone upon his spectacles, hiding his eyes. Giles leaned back in his chair, puffing contentedly at his pipe. The girl sat close to their new guest, Addlepate in her lap, and the old rector was back in his corner. Sitting there, the firelight making a fine tracery of his face, he looked like a Rembrandt etching.
‘Well, about this Estate Agency business,’ said Mr Campion, ‘I’ve got something to put up to you kids.’ His tone was unusually serious.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re wondering where the slow music comes in. It’s like this. It so happened that I wanted a country house in a remote spot for a particularly peppy job I’ve got on hand at the moment. Your announcement that you’d have to let the ancestral home occurred to me, and I thought the two stunts worked in together very well. Giles, old boy, I shall want you to help me. Biddy, could you clear out, my dear, and go and stay with an aunt or something? For a fortnight or so, I mean—until I know how the land lies?’
The girl looked at him with mild surprise in her brown eyes. ‘Seriously?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘More serious than anything in the world.’
Biddy leaned back in her chair. ‘You’ll have to explain,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to miss anything.’
Mr Campion took Biddy’s hand with awful solemnity. ‘Woman,’ he said, ‘this is men’s work. You’ll keep your little turned-up neb out of it. Quite definitely and seriously,’ he went on, ‘this is not your sort of show, old dear.’
‘Suppose you don’t blether so much,’ said Giles; ‘let’s have the facts. You’re so infernally earnest that you’re beginning to be interesting for once.’
Mr Campion got up and wandered up and down the room, his steps sounding sharply on the polished oak floor.
‘Now I’m down here,’ he said suddenly, ‘and I see you dear old birds all tucked up in the ancestral nest, I’ve got an attack of conscience. I ought not to have done this, but since I have I’d better make a clean breast of it.’
The others turned and stared at him, surprised by this unusual outburst.
‘Look here,’ he went on, planting himself back in his chair, ‘I’ll tell you. You read the newspapers, don’t you? Good! Well, have you heard of Judge Lobbett?’
‘The old boy they’re trying to kill?’ said Giles. ‘Yes. You know I showed it to you this morning, St Swithin. Are you in that, Albert?’
Mr Campion nodded gravely. ‘Up to the neck,’ he said, adding hastily, ‘on the right side, of course. You know the rough outline of the business, don’t you? Old Lobbett’s stirred up a hornet’s nest for himself in America and it’s pretty obvious they’ve followed him here.’ He shot a glance at Giles. ‘They’re not out to kill him, you know—not yet. They’re trying to put the fear of God into him and they’ve picked an infernally tough nut. In fact,’ he went on regretfully, ‘if he wasn’t such a tough nut we wouldn’t have such a job. I’m acting for the son, Marlowe Lobbett—a very decent cove; you’ll like him, Giles.’ He paused and looked round at them. ‘Have you got all that?’
They nodded, and he continued: ‘The old boy won’t stand any serious police protection. He himself is our chief difficulty. At first I thought he was going to sink us, but quite by chance I stumbled on a most useful sidelight in his character. The old boy has got a bee in his bonnet about folk-lore—ancient English customs—all that sort of thing. Marlowe introduced me to him as a sort of guide to rural England. Said he’d met me on the boat coming over, as of course he had. Anyway, I’ve let him the house. There’s a title of Lord of the Manor that goes with it, isn’t there?’
Giles glanced up. ‘There is something like that, isn’t there, St Swithin?’
The old man nodded and smiled. ‘There’s a document in the church to that effect,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what good it is to anybody nowadays, though.’
‘Old Judge Lobbett liked it, anyway,’ said Mr Campion. ‘It gives the place a sort of medieval flavour. But I’ll come to that later. All that matters now is that the old bird has taken the place off your hands at fourteen quid a week. And if he knew as much as I do he’d realize he got it cheap.’
Giles sat up. ‘You expect trouble?’ he said.
Mr Campion nodded. ‘I don’t see how we can escape it,’ he said. ‘You see,’ he went on hastily, ‘I had to get the old boy out of the city and down here, because in a place like this if there’re any strangers knocking about we know at once. Look here, Giles, I shall need you to help me.’
Giles grinned. ‘I’m with you,’ he said. ‘It’s time something happened down here.’
‘And I’m in it too,’ said Biddy, that expression of determination which the others knew so well appearing at the corners of her mouth.
Mr Campion shook his head. ‘Sorry, Biddy,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t have that. You don’t know what you’d be letting yourself in for. It was only in a fit of exuberance that I went into it myself.’
Biddy