Duplicate Death Read online

  Mrs Haddington sat down on the arm of her daughter’s chair, and tenderly smoothed the helmet of spun gold about her pretty head. ‘Listen, my pet! I know Dan’s attractive, but he’s not the man for you. He’s an – an old friend of mine, but if I thought that you –’

  ‘Darling Mummy, do be your age!’ begged Cynthia. ‘I haven’t the slightest desire to cut you out with Dan!’

  Mrs Haddington saw no need to reprove her offspring for this speech. She merely said: ‘Then that’s all right. But you mustn’t think I don’t know that he’s been doing his utmost to get you to fall for him. And, of course, men of his age –’

  ‘Too Victorian!’ interrupted Cynthia. ‘Really, Mummy! Oh, God, is it actually six o’clock? I must fly!’

  She wrenched her slim body out of the chair, and bent to pick up the discarded hat. Mrs Haddington said: ‘You’ll have time for a hot bath: it’ll freshen you up.’

  ‘I shall be all right,’ Cynthia repeated. ‘Who’s coming with us?’

  ‘Roddy Vickerstown, the Kenelm Guisboroughs, and Freddy Atherstone.’

  ‘Christ!’ observed Cynthia.

  ‘Well, I know, darling, but the Kenelm Guisboroughs know everybody, and I’m particularly anxious to get you invited to Mrs Atherstone’s dance. It’ll be one of those intime affairs –’

  ‘It sounds lousy,’ said Cynthia. ‘And Kenelm Guisborough is so dull he makes me practically basin-sick, besides having that dim wife, and hating Lance’s guts for being the heir! I suppose it’ll be some ghastly play, too, with a Message, or something that makes you want to cry with boredom!’

  Mrs Haddington regarded her in some perturbation. ‘Darling, if you’re really too tired, I’ll ring Nest up, and ask her if she can possibly –’

  ‘Oh, Mummy, do stop fussing!’ Cynthia said impatiently. ‘I shall be all right when I’ve had a bath!’

  Mrs Haddington looked doubtful, but when she next saw her daughter she perceived that the hot bath had had unexpectedly recuperative powers. A vision in delicate shades of floating yellow chiffon, Cynthia ran down the stairs three-quarters of an hour later, and burst upon the assembled theatre-party, partaking of sand wiches and cocktails in the library, with apologies for her tardiness on her smiling lips, and such a brilliant glow in her eyes as caused Mr Freddy Atherstone, hovering on the brink of matrimony with another, to experience a serious cardiac qualm. Only Mrs Haddington, staring for an unwinking moment, seemed to derive no pleasure from her daughter’s radiant beauty; and although Mrs Kenelm Guisborough afterwards informed her husband that Lilias had looked at Cynthia in the most extraordinary way, the revealing moment passed so swiftly that Mr Kenelm Guisborough was able to assert that he had noticed nothing, and that his wife was always imagining things.

  Four

  By the time that Mrs Haddington’s duplicate Bridge-party assembled, at nine o’clock on a Tuesday evening, several persons’ tempers were exacerbated, and Miss Beulah Birtley had been obliged to swallow an aspirin to quell an incipient headache.

  The day began badly with the inevitable discovery by one of the invited guests that circumstances over which he had no control would prevent his honouring his engagement. Having assured the delinquent, in her sweetest voice, that it didn’t matter at all, Mrs Haddington slammed down the telephone, and ordered her maid, who had just brought up her breakfasttray, to send Miss Birtley to her at once, and to tell her to bring the address-book with her. Upon its being pointed out to her that Miss Birtley was not due to arrive in Charles Street for another quarter of an hour, she delivered herself of some rather venomous remarks about the inefficiency and laziness of every member of her staff, which did nothing to endear her to the representative before her. Indeed, this prim-lipped virgin lost no time in requesting her employer, in accents of painful gentility, to accept her notice.

  ‘Don’t be a fool! Why should you want to leave?’ demanded Mrs Haddington.

  Miss Mapperley said that she would rather not say; and at once, and in curious contradiction of her statement, began to enumerate the many and varied reasons which made her disinclined to remain under Mrs Haddington’s roof. Chief among these seemed to be her dislike of being expected to wait on two people. She said that she had never been one to complain but that maiding Miss Cynthia was one person’s work, and work, moreover, for which she had not originally been engaged.

  As Mrs Haddington had been determined to set her henchwoman to work that day on the task of altering the frock she had bought for Cynthia to wear that very evening, and which a conscienceless couturier had delivered on the previous afternoon in a far from perfect condition, these fell words made it apparent that some at least of the day’s plans would have to be re-edited. She was not the woman to bandy words with one who would all too probably walk out of the house on slight provocation, so she merely dismissed Miss Mapperley from her room and vented her wrath presently on her secretary.

  The fact that Beulah did not arrive in Charles Street until ten o’clock furnished her with an excellent excuse for verbally blistering the girl. That she had herself ordered Beulah to go first to Covent Garden market that morning, to buy flowers for the party, she at once acknowledged and dismissed by saying acidly that she would have supposed Beulah to have had time to have gone there twice over.

  ‘Don’t stand there making excuses, but go downstairs and fetch me my address book! I’m a man short tonight! And when you’ve done that you’ll have to go to Fulham and get hold of Miss Spennymoor, and tell her I want her to come here today to alter Miss Haddington’s frock. Why the wretched woman isn’t on the telephone is more than I can fathom! She doesn’t deserve to be employed at all when she makes things as difficult as she can. You can do the flowers when you get back.’

  By the time Beulah returned from her errand to the little dressmaker in Fulham, Mrs Haddington had been driven into the last ditch, and forced to fall back, for her substitute guest, on the one person she had vowed never to invite again. Rather than include herself amongst the players, an arrangement which she considered detri mental to the smooth running of the party, since a hostess’s eye (she said) should be everywhere, she had unbent towards Mr Sydney Butterwick, who was providentially free that evening. By rearranging the tables, so that he and Dan Seaton-Carew should play in different rooms for as long as was possible, she hoped that he might be deterred from giving expression to the jealousy he suffered every time Mr Seaton-Carew bestowed his favours elsewhere. Mrs Haddington was even broader-minded than young Mr Harte, but she had the greatest dislike of shrill-voiced, nail-biting scenes being enacted at her more select parties.

  The intelligence, brought by Beulah, that Miss Spennymoor would, as she herself phrased it, do her best to fit Mrs Haddington in during the course of the afternoon, brought a slight alleviation of the morning’s ills, but this was soon dissipated by an unnerving message from the chef that no lobsters had as yet reached London, and that as none of the fishmongers whom he had personally rung up could give him any assurance that the dilatory crustaceans would arrive in time to appear at the party, he would be glad to know with what alternative delicacy Madame would desire him to fill one hundred patties. Hardly had Mrs Haddington dealt with this difficulty than her attention was claimed by Thrimby, her extremely supercilious butler. Since she paid him very handsome wages, and always supported him in any quarrel he might have with the other members of the staff, he had been in her service for longer than any of his colleagues, having been engaged when she first moved into the house in Charles Street eighteen months earlier. He was always very polite, for this was something which he owed to himself, but he deeply despised her, and frequently regaled such of the upper servants as he honoured with his patronage with odious comparisons drawn between her and his previous employers. The economies which Mrs Haddington practised behind the scenes, and, too often, at her servants’ expense, never failed to mortify him, for Such Ways, he said, were not what he had been accustomed to. He was in the present instance offended by his mi