Death by Water by Innes Michael

Author:Innes, Michael [Innes, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NewBook, Mystery
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Published: 1968-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

11.

As they left Allington, Judith took the wheel.

“Which way?” she asked. “John, would you like me to take the other drive, the one you came and went by last night?”

“I don’t think so. It was pretty bumpy. I’d rather go out as we came in this afternoon, straight down the lakeside. I’m not sure that I wasn’t being defective as what you call a man of observation as we drove up.”

Judith made no reply, but turned the car in the direction indicated. Wilfred Osborne was carrying a pair of embroidered carpet slippers, a random purchase at which he was now looking without confidence.

“An enjoyable afternoon,” he said. “Pleasant to wander round the old place. And Allington isn’t a bad fellow.”

“He’s better than some of his relations,” Appleby said.

“Well, of course, they’re rather urban souls—those Leatherbreeches and Bartenders, or whatever they’re called.” Osborne seemed to have produced these names in honest vagueness, and without derogatory intention. “As for Martin Allington, we’ve had no fresh impression of him. He didn’t turn up. But all very pleasant, as I say. Nice to see poor old Scrape enjoying himself. Decent chap.”

“Wilfred, are you being quite honest?” Judith exercised some caution in edging past a final band of stragglers from the fête. “Seeing all these Allingtons, don’t you rather feel the incursion of the lion and the lizard?”

“Of the what, my dear?”

“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.”

“Oh, that!” Osborne was delighted that his memory now reached out to this learned citation. “There were Allingtons there long before there were Osbornes, after all.”

“But doesn’t that, in fact, make it more annoying?”

“I really believe it does.” Osborne’s pleasure this time was in being presented with so surprising a piece of psychological penetration. “When I sold the place, I was at particular pains to make it appear otherwise. And I think I really felt that way at the time. It was a satisfaction that, since I had to sell, the purchaser came from that family. But now—yes, it’s perfectly true. I’d prefer an entirely new chap.”

“Who wouldn’t talk about Pax in Bello.”

“Fair enough, my dear. But he meant no harm. Lived all his days among test tubes and things. And you can’t speak out of turn to a test tube. Lovely light on the lake now. “Wilfred”—it seemed to Appleby that Judith was in one of her perverse moods—“if you knew where that treasure was, would you agree to you and me stealing in one night with dark lanterns and things, and nobbling it?”

“Of course not!” This time, Osborne was really amused. At the same time he peered out, first at the surface of the lake and then up and down the drive, as if suddenly tempted to a very easy way of getting rid of the carpet slippers. “I wouldn’t mind breaking into the house, you know, and making away with all that Georgian silver, with heaven knows whose crests and arms and mottoes, which one feels Allington has simply picked up in salerooms.

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