“Which was? Where does it lead you, Daisy?”
She had hooked him, but whether she could sustain his interest with what followed was another matter. “Now, the next bit is pure speculation.” She was not surprised when his brows met again, but at least he was still listening. “Suppose Miss Hensted overheard. Suppose she decides her chance has come. She will be his consolation! She waits till she's sure Mrs. Walker has leftâall she'd have to do is stick her head out of the waiting room door to the drive and watch. Then she goes through to the surgery and passionately offers her all.”
“And he rejects her,” said Alec.
Daisy frowned at him, for a change. “In the meantime, he has settled himself in his chair and donned the mask. Another woman might be repulsed by the grotesque sight,
but she sees it daily. When she declares herself, he has already turned on the gas and the oxygen and breathed a whiff. He doesn't merely reject her. He laughs at her.”
Alec slowly nodded. “I myself saw her violent reaction when Hilda Kidd laughed at her.”
Tom focussed on the practical: “The nurse, of all people, knows what to do to kill with that apparatus, and where to find the bandages and sticking plaster.”
“And a nurse, of all people,” Daisy said, “learns to watch with cool composure as someone dies.”
Daisy didn't hear the end of the story, or as near as it came to an end, till late the following Monday. In the interim, Alec told her nothing of his investigations. On Monday he came home late, having eaten in the canteen, and slumped in his favourite chair in the living room.
“Get me a whisky, love,” he asked, most unusually. “It looks as if you were right,” he went on when she came back from adding water to the amber liquid.
Daisy sat down on the sofa with her legs curled up under her in a most unladylike pose she would not have ventured in her mother-in-law's presence. Nor her own mother's, come to that. “You've arrested Nurse Hensted?”
“No such luck. She left her digs the day Creighton settled with her, although she'd paid her rent to the end of the month. Cashed his cheque and cleaned out her bank account. A nice sum, nearly two hundred pounds, saved in dribs and drabs over the years.”
“Which shows she isn't the kind of person to waste her rent money by moving out early.”
“Exactly. She gave the landlady her parents' address in Bishop's Stortford as a forwarding address. Tom went down to see them, but they hadn't heard from her since Christmas. Kept herself to herself, they say. Respectable people. They put us on to other relatives. No one's seen hide nor hair of her.”
“What about the nurses' agency?”
“We found their name and address in Talmadge's papers. She hasn't been back since they sent her to him three years ago, nor has she approached any of the other agencies in town. Have you any idea how many nurses' agencies there are in London?”
“Not the foggiest, darling.”
“No doubt Piper could give you the exact figure. He visited them all.”
“I suppose she'd have to use her real name because of references and her registration papers.”
“Presumably, but Ernie described her anyway, without result. She had quite distinctive features.”
“Quite pretty. As far as looks go, she had no reason to despair of Talmadge's attentions.”
“Mrs. Talmadge and her servants confirm that she seemed to be keen on him, and the landlady says she mentioned once or twice how handsome he was. We're assuming your theory is correct as to motive, but it's lucky that's one thing we don't have to prove. Means and opportunity she had, and her subsequent actions are definitely indicative of guilt.”
“She's completely disappeared? Surely you'll find her sooner or later.”
“Oh, we know where she went.”
“Where? Is this tit for tat, darling?”
Alec grinned. “Of course not. Such childishness is beneath me. I'm just telling it as it happened. When Ernie drew a blank at the last agency, the woman suggested Brenda Hensted might have found a job through the agony column in the
Times
. We went through the back numbers. You'd be amazed at how many elderly invalids in comfortable circs are urgently in need of nursing care, other staff kept.”
“No, I wouldn't. I imagine there's quite a high attrition rate, invalids being notoriously crabby. Nurse Hensted swore she'd rather go back to hospital work than be at an invalid's beck and call.”
“Yes, Ernie has it down in black and white. Yet she didn't even try for a hospital position, which the agency said she would have found at once, registered nurses being in short supply. So the
Times
adverts were worth a try.”
“Don't tell me you talked the editor of the
Times
into violating the sacred secrecy of the Box Number?” asked Daisy, awed.
“Rather than try, we started by ringing up the few advertisers who gave telephone numbers. It was late Saturday afternoon by then, though, and hard to get hold of people. As it turned out, the chap we wanted had gone down to his constituency.”
“A Member of Parliament?”
“Whose invalid mother-in-law departed on Thursday to take the waters in Baden-Baden. In a wheelchair pushed by Miss Hensted.”
“She's gone abroad! Oh, Alec! I'm surprised she had a passport.”
“As an MP he was able to get her one in a couple of days. She rang up about the job on Monday evening.”
“A few hours after Talmadge's death!”
“She went for an interview and was hired on Tuesday, a few hours after Creighton paid her off and wrote a reference for her. They caught the boat train on Thursday and by now they'll be in Baden.”
“Surely the German police can arrest her for you, darling?”
“Germany's in too much of a mess these days to count on anything. I'm told France hasn't actually made a grab for that bit of the country, at least not yet, though Baden's not far from the French frontier. It's supposed to be safe from the chaos because the spa earns so much foreign currency no one can afford to muck about with it. But it's easy enough for anyone to disappear into the surrounding area, and thence who knows where. Our MP just received a desperate cable from mama-in-law saying please send a new nurse. Miss Hensted has vanished.”
“Oh, darling!”
“Not one of my greatest successes,” Alec said wryly. “There were too many obvious suspects. I never even looked at the nurse.”
“More whisky?”
He laughed. “No, it's not bad enough to drive me to drink. Let's go to bed.”
On the way up the stairs, Daisy said, “I went to see Daphne Talmadge today.”
“Yes? You're not going to change your mind and tell me she or Creighton did it!”
“No, darling. Apparently the baby-to-be is out of danger.
They're so happy about it, she and Lord Henry.” She slipped her arm through his. “Alec, what would you think about giving Belinda a little brother or sister?”
“Suits me,” said Alec.