Split Code by Dorothy Dunnett

Author:Dorothy Dunnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Split Code
ISBN: 9780755131594
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

She must have been seventy-five anyway, which when you look around is no great age, I suppose in a woman, and you would expect her to have everything tucked that would tuck; and she had. But she also had the poise and the drive and the dress sense of a woman who had married a small émigré pharmaceutist and turned him into a world cosmetics industry, with centres in London and New York and Paris.

The bewildered Warr Beckenstaff had a breakdown and died shortly after the tenth balance sheet; and thereafter nothing could stop her. And now she stood there in her pink silk jersey dress and examined me, the wealthy lady who had chosen the schools and colleges and finishing establishments which had made Rosamund what she was, and looked like making an equal mess of my Benedict.

Tall as her daughter, Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff was spider-thin, the brittle shafts of her wrists and shoulders emphasized by the weight of metal she wore, embedded with gemstones. Her eyes were Rosamund’s: large and sunken and heavy-lidded; and if her chin was too definite, her cheek-bones were good and her mouth still had planes that could be tinted. The hair, a smooth bouffant silver grey, stopped just short of her ears and swept asymmetrically over in a wing which just cleared her left eye. Glimpsed briefly, from the other side of a street she would have had Donovan after her.

I must have smiled at the thought because she said, ‘You disappoint me. Why not answer? I thought you had character,’ and sat down.

‘I’m sorry. I was trying to remember,’ I said. ‘Was that all you wanted to know?’

‘How very prudish,’ she said. She had a gold and black onyx cigarette holder to match her necklet and was choosing a pink and silver scroll to screw into it. She looked up. ‘Sit down, girl. I am unlikely either to be shocked or to sack you for immorality. I am told that you have been a devoted and courageous nurse to my grandson, and I hope you feel that your services are being adequately recognized. I wish you to continue your excellent care of him. I also wish, in exchange, some information. My son-in-law sleeps around, and I don’t like it.’

I sat down, keeping my back straight, my ankles crossed and my hands with my gloves in my lap. ‘Not with me, Mrs Warr Beckenstaff,’ I said politely.

‘I think that’s probably true,’ she said annoyingly. ‘Go on. With whom, then?’

I said, ‘I have a full-time job with Benedict. There really isn’t much opportunity to study what else is going on in the household. In any case, it isn’t my business.’

‘So it’s the Eisenkopp woman. I was afraid so,’ said Mrs Warr Beckenstaff. I wondered how I had given that away, and concluded she was the only piece of crumpet who lived so near that I was bound to have noticed. Or else she knew already, and it was merely a move in the game. The power game which, of course, she was playing with me.

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