Postern of Fate Read online

  'And there are files in newspaper offices that you can read and study.'

  'You mean accounts of something - like murders or court cases?'

  'Not necessarily, but one has had contact with certain people from time to time. People who know things - one can look them up - ask a few questions - renew old friendships. Like the time we were being a private detective firm in London. There are a few people, I expect, who could give us information or tell us where to go. Things do depend a bit on who you know.'

  'Yes,' said Tuppence, 'that's quite true. I know that myself from experience.'

  'Our methods aren't the same,' said Tommy. 'I think yours are just as good as mine. I'll never forget the day I came suddenly into that boarding-house, or whatever it was, Sans Souci. The first thing I saw was you sitting there knitting and calling yourself Mrs Blenkinsop.'

  'All because I hadn't applied research, or getting anyone to do research for me,' said Tuppence.

  'No,' said Tommy, 'you got inside a wardrobe next door to the room where I was being interviewed in a very interesting manner, so you knew exactly where I was being sent and what I was meant to do, and you managed to get there first. Eavesdropping. Neither more nor less. Most dishonourable.'

  'With very satisfactory results,' said Tuppence.

  'Yes,' said Tommy. 'You have a kind of feeling for success. It seems to happen to you.'

  'Well, some day we shall know all about everything here, only it's all such years and years ago. I can't help thinking that the idea of something really important being hidden round here or owned by someone here, or something to do with this house or people who once lived in it being important - I can't just believe it somehow. Oh well, I see what we shall have to do next.'

  'What?' said Tommy.

  'Believe six impossible things before breakfast, of course,' said Tuppence. 'It's quarter to eleven now, and I want to go to bed. I'm tired. I'm sleepy and extremely dirty because of playing around with all those dusty, ancient toys and things. I expect there are even more things in that place that's called - by the way, why is it called Kay Kay?'

  'I don't know. Do you spell it at all?'

  'I don't know - I think it's spelt k-a-i. Not just KK.'

  'Because it sounds more mysterious?'

  'It sounds Japanese,' said Tuppence doubtfully.

  'I can't see why it should sound to you like Japanese. It doesn't to me. It sounds more like something you eat. A kind of rice, perhaps.'

  'I'm going to bed and to wash thoroughly and to get all the cobwebs off me somehow,' said Tuppence.

  'Remember,' said Tommy, 'six impossible things before breakfast.'

  'I expect I shall be better at that than you would be,' said Tuppence.

  'You're very unexpected sometimes,' said Tommy.

  'You're more often right than I am,' said Tuppence. 'That's very annoying sometimes. Well, these things are sent to try us. Who used to say that to us? Quite often, too.'

  'Never mind,' said Tommy. 'Go and clean the dust of bygone years off you. Is Isaac any good at gardening?'

  'He considers he is,' said Tuppence. 'We might experiment with him -'

  'Unfortunately we don't know much about gardening ourselves. Yet another problem.'

  Chapter 4

  EXPEDITION ON TRUELOVE; OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE

  'Six impossible things before breakfast indeed,' said Tuppence as she drained a cup of coffee and considered a fried egg remaining in the dish on the sideboard, flanked by two appetizing-looking kidneys. 'Breakfast is more worthwhile than thinking of impossible things. Tommy is the one who has gone after impossible things. Research indeed. I wonder if he'll get anything out of it all.'

  She applied herself to a fried egg and kidneys.

  'How nice,' said Tuppence, 'to have a different kind of breakfast.'

  For a long time she had managed to regale herself in the morning with a cup of coffee and either orange juice or grapefruit. Although satisfactory so long as any weight problems were thereby solved, the pleasures of this kind of breakfast were not much appreciated. From the force of contrasts, hot dishes on the sideboard animated the digestive juices.

  'I expect,' said Tuppence, 'it's what the Parkinsons used to have for breakfast here. Fried eggs or poached eggs and bacon and perhaps -' she threw her mind a good long way back to remembrances of old novels - 'perhaps yes, perhaps cold grouse on the sideboard, delicious! Oh yes, I remember, delicious it sounded. Of course, I suppose children were so unimportant that they only let them have the legs. Legs of game are very good because you can nibble at them.' She paused with the last piece of kidney in her mouth.

  Very strange noises seemed to be coming through the doorway.

  'I wonder,' said Tuppence. 'It sounds like a concert gone wrong somewhere.'

  She paused again, a piece of toast in her hand, and looked up as Albert entered the room.

  'What is going on, Albert?' demanded Tuppence. 'Don't tell me that's our workmen playing something? A harmonium or something like that?'

  'It's the gentleman what's come to do the piano,' said Albert.

  'Come to do what to the piano?'

  'To tune it. You said I'd have to get a piano tuner.'

  'Good gracious,' said Tuppence, 'you've done it already? How wonderful you are, Albert.'

  Albert looked pleased, though at the same time conscious of the fact that he was very wonderful in the speed with which he could usually supply the extraordinary demands made upon him sometimes by Tuppence and sometimes by Tommy.

  'He says it needs it very bad,' he said.

  'I expect it does,' said Tuppence.

  She drank half a cup of coffee, went out of the room and into the drawing-room. A young man was at work at the grand piano, which was revealing to the world large quantities of its inside.

  'Good morning, madam,' said the young man.

  'Good morning,' said Tuppence. 'I'm so glad you've managed to come.'

  'Ah, it needs tuning, it does.'

  'Yes,' said Tuppence, 'I know. You see, we've only just moved in and it's not very good for pianos, being moved into houses and things. And it hasn't been tuned for a long time.'

  'No, I can soon tell that,' said the young man.

  He pressed three different chords in turn, two cheerful ones in a major key, two very melancholy ones in A Minor.

  'A beautiful instrument, madam, if I may say so.'

  'Yes,' said Tuppence. 'It's an Erard.'

  'And a piano you wouldn't get so easily nowadays.'

  'It's been through a few troubles,' said Tuppence. 'It's been through bombing in London. Our house there was hit. Luckily we were away, but it was mostly outside that was damaged.'

  'Yes. Yes, the works are good. They don't need so very much doing to them.'

  Conversation continued pleasantly. The young man played the opening bars of a Chopin Prelude and passed from that to a rendering of 'The Blue Danube'. Presently he announced that his ministrations had finished.

  'I shouldn't leave it too long,' he warned her. 'I'd like the chance to come and try it again before too much time has gone by because you don't know quite when it might not - well, I don't know how I should put it - relapse a bit. You know, some little thing that you haven't noticed or haven't been able to get at.'

  They parted with mutually appreciative remarks on music in general and on piano music in particular, and with the polite salutations of two people who agreed very largely in their ideas as to the joys that music generally played in life.

  'Needs a lot doing to it, I expect, this house,' he said, looking round him.

  'Well, I think it had been empty some time when we came into it.'

  'Oh yes. It's changed hands a lot, you know.'

  'Got quite a history, hasn't it,' said Tuppence. 'I mean, the people who lived in it in the past and the sort of queer things that happened.'

  'Ah well, I expect you're talking of that time long ago. I don't know if it was the last war or the one before.'

&
nbsp; 'Something to do with naval secrets or something,' said Tuppence hopefully.

  'Could be, I expect. There was a lot of talk, so they tell me, but of course I don't know anything about it myself.'

  'Well before your time,' said Tuppence, looking appreciatively at his youthful countenance.

  When he had gone, she sat down at the piano.

  'I'll play "The Rain on the Roof",' said Tuppence, who had had this Chopin memory revived in her by the piano tuner's execution of one of the other preludes. Then she dropped into some chords and began playing the accompaniment to a song, humming it first and then murmuring the words as well.

  Where has my true love gone a-roaming?

  Where has my true love gone from me?

  High in the woods the birds are calling.

  When will my true love come back to me?

  'I'm playing it in the wrong key, I believe,' said Tuppence. 'but at any rate, the piano's all right again now. Oh, it is great fun to be able to play the piano again. "Where has my true love gone a-roaming?'" she murmured. '"When will my true love" - Truelove,' said Tuppence thoughtfully. 'True love? Yes, I'm thinking of that perhaps as a sign. Perhaps I'd better go out and do something with Truelove.'

  She put on her thick shoes and a pullover, and went out into the garden. Truelove had been pushed, not back into his former home in KK, but into the empty stable. Tuppence took him out, pulled him to the top of the grass slope, gave him a sharp flick with the duster she had brought out with her to remove the worst of the cobwebs which still adhered in many places, got into Truelove, placed her feet on the pedals and induced Truelove to display his paces as well as he could in his condition of general age and wear.

  'Now, my true love,' she said, 'down the hill with you and not too fast.'

  She removed her feet from the pedals and placed them in a position where she could brake with them when necessary.

  Truelove was not inclined to go very fast in spite of the advantage to him of having only to go by weight down the hill. However, the slope increased in steepness suddenly. Truelove increased his pace, Tuppence applied her feet as brakes rather more sharply and she and Truelove arrived together at a rather more uncomfortable portion than usual of the monkey puzzle at the bottom of the hill.

  'Most painful,' said Tuppence, excavating herself.

  Having extricated herself from the pricking of various portions of the monkey puzzle, Tuppence brushed herself down and looked around her. She had come to a thick bit of shrubbery leading up the hill in the opposite direction. There were rhododendron bushes here and hydrangeas. It would look, Tuppence thought, very lovely later in the year. At the moment, there was no particular beauty about it, it was a mere thicket. However, she did seem to notice that there had once been a pathway leading up between the various flower bushes and shrubs. Everything was much grown together now but you could trace the direction of the path. Tuppence broke off a branch or two, pressed her way through the first bushes and managed to follow the hill. The path went winding up. It was clear that nobody had ever cleared it or walked down it for years.

  'I wonder where it takes one,' said Tuppence. 'There must be a reason for it.'

  Perhaps, she thought, as the path took a couple of sharp turns in opposite directions, making a zigzag and making Tuppence feel that she knew exactly what Alice in Wonderland had meant by saying that a path would suddenly shake itself and change direction. There were fewer bushes, there were laurels now, possibly fitting in with the name given to the property, and then a rather stony, difficult, narrow path wound up between them. It came very suddenly to four moss-covered steps leading up to a kind of niche made of what had once been metal and later seemed to have been replaced by bottles. A kind of shrine, and in it a pedestal and on this pedestal a stone figure, very much decayed. It was the figure of a boy with a basket on his head. A feeling of recognition came to Tuppence.

  'This is the sort of thing you could date a place with,' she said. 'It's very like the one Aunt Sarah had in her garden. She had a lot of laurels too.'

  Her mind went back to Aunt Sarah, whom she had occasionally visited as a child. She had played herself, she remembered, a game called River Horses. For River Horses you took your hoop out. Tuppence, it may be said, had been six years old at the time. Her hoop represented the horses. White horses with manes and flowing tails. In Tuppence's imagination, with that you had gone across a green, rather thick patch of grass and you had then gone round a bed planted with pampas grass waving feathery heads into the air, up the same kind of a path, and leaning there among some beech trees in the same sort of summer-house niche was a figure and a basket. Tuppence, when riding her winning horses here, had taken a gift always, a gift you put in the basket on top of the boy's head; at the same time you said it was an offering and you made a wish. The wish, Tuppence remembered, was nearly always to come true.

  'But that,' said Tuppence, sitting down suddenly on the top step of the flight she had been climbing, 'that, of course, was because I cheated really. I mean, I wished for something that I knew was almost sure to happen, and then I could feel that my wish had come true and it really was a magic. It was a proper offering to a real god from the past. Though it wasn't a god really, it was just a podgy-looking little boy. Ah well - what fun it is, all the things one used to invent and believe in and play at.'

  She sighed, went down the path again and found her way to the mysteriously named KK.

  KK looked in just the same mess as ever. Mathilde was still looking forlorn and forsaken, but two more things attracted Tuppence's attention. They were in porcelain - porcelain stools with the figures of white swans curled round them. One stool was dark blue and the other stool was pale blue.

  'Of course,' said Tuppence, 'I've seen things like that before when I was young. Yes, they used to be on verandas. One of my other aunts had them, I think. We used to call them Oxford and Cambridge. Very much the same. I think it was ducks - no, it was swans they had round them. And then there was the same sort of queer thing in the seat, a sort of hole that was like a letter S. The sort of thing you could put things into. Yes, I think I'll get Isaac to take these stools out of here and give them a good wash, and then we'll have them on the loggia, or lodger as he will insist on calling it, though the veranda comes more natural to me. We'll put them on that and enjoy them when the good weather comes.'

  She turned and started to run towards the door. Her foot caught in Mathilde's obtrusive rocker -

  'Oh dear!' said Tuppence, 'now what have I done?'

  What she had done was to catch her foot in the dark blue porcelain stool and it had rolled down on to the floor and smashed in two pieces.

  'Oh dear,' said Tuppence, 'now I've really killed Oxford, I suppose. We shall have to make do with Cambridge. I don't think you could stick Oxford together again. The pieces are too difficult.'

  She sighed and wondered what Tommy was doing.

  Tommy was sitting exchanging memories with some old friends.

  'World's in a funny way nowadays,' said Colonel Atkinson. 'I hear you and your what's-her-name, Prudence - no, you had a nickname for her, Tuppence, that's right - yes, I hear you've gone to live in the country. Somewhere down near Hollowquay. I wonder what took you there. Anything particular?'

  'Well, we found this house fairly cheap,' said Tommy.

  'Ah. Well, that's lucky always, isn't it? What's the name? You must give me your address.'

  'Well, we think we may call it Cedar Lodge because there's a very nice cedar there. Its original name was The Laurels, but that's rather a Victorian hangover, isn't it?'

  'The Laurels. The Laurels, Hollowquay. My word, what are you up to, eh? What are you up to?'

  Tommy looked at the elderly face with the sprouting white moustache.

  'On to something, are you?' said Colonel Atkinson. 'Are you employed in the service of your country again?'

  'Oh, I'm too old for that,' said Tommy. 'I'm retired from all that sort of stuff.'

  'Ah, I won
der now. Perhaps that's just the thing you say. Perhaps you've been told to say that. After all, you know, there's a good deal was never found out about all that business.'

  'What business?' said Tommy.

  'Well, I expect you've read about it or heard about it. The Cardington Scandal. You know, came after that other thing - the what-you-call-'em letters - and the Emlyn Johnson submarine business.'

  'Oh,' said Tommy, 'I seem to remember something vaguely.'

  'Well, it wasn't actually the submarine business, but that's what called attention to the whole thing. And there were those letters, you see. Gave the whole show away politically. Yes. Letters. If they'd been able to get hold of them it would have made a big difference. It would have drawn attention to several people who at the time were the most highly trusted people in the government. Astonishing how these things happen, isn't it? You know! The traitors in one's midst, always highly trusted, always splendid fellows, always the last people to be suspected - and all the time - well, a lot of all that never came to light.' He winked one eye. 'Perhaps you've been sent down there to have a look round, eh, my boy?'